The Heart of the Matter: On Noticing

Lou Spaventa, USA

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

This year occasions my second time to stay for an extended period in Italy. The first time was the spring semester of 2004, from the end of January to the beginning of May. This second time is the spring semester of 2007. It began on February 1^st and will continue to the middle of May. The first time I was here I had prepared by studying Italian for about a year prior to my arrival. I studied in a class with other students, about 6 hours per week for a semester. Then I got an Italian language tutor and studied once a week for an hour with her. This time I didn't study much before coming to Italy. I just reviewed verb tenses. When I got here I resumed once a week lessons with the same Italian tutor I had had previously. She had returned to Florence, where I am presently. I also attend a 2 hour class of "conversation," in inverted commas because conversation is usually from teacher to class, with little student to student involvement, unfortunately. Beyond that, I have occasionally read La Repubblica on-line. But this time in Italy is different for me. It all has to do with noticing things.

The first thing I noticed was that all the folks I had seen daily the first time I was in Florence for the semester were still at their posts. This includes shop owners, La Standa checkout employees, Italian language teachers, restaurant maitre d's, and waiters. Such constancy contrasts to the San Francisco-based educational exchange company, Accent, that facilitates my school's abroad semester in Florence. All its personnel had changed. The fact that I was seeing a lot of familiar faces n the streets of Florence did two things for me. One it made me realize that people tend to stay put in Italy. If they are waiters, they are waiters for their working lives at a particular restaurant. The second is that this realization made me feel comfortable and gave me a sense of returning to a place I knew before. This was a positive feeling and I think it has helped me to get right back into the language.

The second thing that I noticed was that I was paying attention to different elements of the language this time around. Whereas last time I was almost always focused on the word level, this time I am almost always focused on the discourse level. Even when I am grappling with the right word, it is because I am trying to find the right word for the conversation in which I am taking part. The size of the bits of information that I hold in short term memory are much larger than what they were before, sentences and phrases versus words. George Miller in "The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two" (1956) claimed that short term memory is limited to seven bits of information give or take two. So, if this is true, the size of the bits I am able to retain has a lot to do with my level of language achievement. As a beginner, I grappled with words. My short term memory was working hard to retain words for storage in long term memory. As a result, my vocabulary increased, but my fluency was limited to stock phrases such as "Di dov'e' sei?" (Where are you from?). Now, I am at a higher level and what I notice is that I am paying much more attention to discourse strategies. I am anticipating the shape of conversation and working out my next move. It is interesting to me that in my Italian conversation class, the instructor, with whom I had studied three years previous, uses the same readings he had then. However, this time I was looking at story and not solely at vocabulary. It is like seeing the same person, but understanding her in a totally different way. I also know that there are elements of the language that I have been exposed to repeatedly and that I comprehend on an intellectual level, but that I don't use because my capacity to notice them is limited by the level of my language, by what it compels me to notice.

For me, this idea of noticing fits in very well with stage theories of language acquisition because I can only work with language that is appropriate for my stage of linguistic accomplishment. I find it hard to go beyond it. While this may seem an unfortunate state of affairs because it means I don't really understand all that is right in front of me, it is actually positive for me. It limits what I focus on and forces me to pay attention to what I need rather than what I think I should have.

To give a further example, I regularly watch a TV game show entitled "Qui Vuol' Essere Milionario." It is a game show - on at least two continents - where contestants answer multiple choice questions and climb a ladder towards a million, dollars, pounds or euros. This show has the virtue of televising the question the MC is asking in subtitles at the bottom of the screen. I have mastered the question forms used, yet I often have to look up vocabulary because there are a lot of obscure terms for contestants to figure out. So because I have mastered the form of the quiz, I now focus on the repartee between the MC, Geri Scotti , and each contestant. It is what I am noticing now and what I am trying to understand and master. I have made some progress. I get the part about marital status, profession, and person accompanying the contestant. The part I am working on is the give and take between Scotti and the contestant as regards each question and the way the contestant understands it. The last time I was in Italy, I watched a game show with a very similar format entitled "L'eredita'." At that time, I concentrated on vocabulary almost exclusively.

One other aspect of a change in what I notice is that the things I struggled with linguistically the first time around, I now accept and execute without much thought and with some confidence. This, I suppose, conveys a sense of achievement of a sort although I know that the more I know the more I realize there is to know.

While linguistic distance between English and Italian is not as daunting as that between English and Korean, for example, it nevertheless becomes more apparent that linguistic phenomena such as word order take on different meanings when one compares both languages. Italian permits pre- and post- nominal placement of adjectives with a concurrent difference in interpretation. An example would be "un vecchio amico" as opposed to "un amico vecchio," "an old friend (of mine) versus "an old friend (in terms of his age). In English, only adverbs seem to be as free in movement pre- and post- verbal. For example, one could say a person was "hysterically sobbing" or "sobbing hysterically," without much difference in meaning that I can see. Thus, even as I go over some of the same grammatical ground that I did previously, I tend to notice new things and give them my attention.

A century ago Otto Jesperson wrote that we tend to treat languages as if grammar were used in some sort of logical order: one week simple present tense, the next present continuous while the speakers of a language use everything at their command. I think what noticing does for the language learner is treat a lot of what goes on in the language environment as white noise, not to be attended to because one's ability is not equal to giving it attention. On the other hand, it enables the learner to focus on what he needs to attend to, and this is a very helpful tool.

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