The Effect of Reconstruction as a Noticing Strategy on Iranian Female First Grade High School Students’ Writing Ability Anahita Vahidi Department of English, Hamedan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran Lotfollah Karimi Department of English, Hamedan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran Mohammad Hadi Mahmoodi Department of English, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran Abstract—Most Iranian high school and university students suffer from lack of enough knowledge of writing and are not able to communicate via this skill properly. To help Iranian EFL learners improve their writing skill, in the present study attempts were made to investigate the effect of reconstruction, as a noticing strategy, on first grade high school female students’ writing ability. To this end, 96 participants were selected via convenience sampling technique and were divided into two groups —experimental and control (48 participants each). Before beginning the treatment, the pretest was administered to the two groups. The experimental group reconstructed the original extracts during 10 treatment sessions each took 40 minutes while the control group was taught writing skill through explicit explanation without reconstruction. Finally, the posttest was administered to both groups. The data collected were analyzed running ANCOVA and the results showed that the main effect of the treatment was significant. Index Terms—noticing, reconstruction, writing ability I. INTRODUCTION A. Overview It is about two decades that many scholars have debated that second language acquisition (SLA) is the result of what learners pay attention to and become aware of in target language (TL) input. In other words, they believe that people learn more about things they attend to in comparison to the things they do not (Schmidt, 2010). The most challenging claims in the role of noticing have been posed by Schmidt (1990) and Ellis (1995). Schmidt (1990) argued that attention plays a crucial role in learning and claimed “there can be no learning without attention”, but he was not the only person who believed in such a strong claim (Gass & Selinker, 1994). Ellis (1995) also asserted in his models that noticing is the primary step for learning and evoked “no noticing, no acquisition”. However, such claims are in dispute; for example, Reber (1989) as a psychologist and Doughty (2001, in Ellis 2008) believe in unconscious learning it means learning without awareness is possible. But Schmidt (1994) pointed out “it is not clear to what extent such learning is robust and long-lasting or peripheral and fragile”. He believes that the role of unconscious learning has been exaggerated (Ellis, 2008). Schmidt’s idea, eventually, result ed in his proposal of ‘Noticing Hypothesis’ and its underlying hypothesis called ‘Noticing the Gap’. The role of noticing and consciousness in SLA has gained increasing support recently. Reviewing a number of empirical studies related to the notion of noticing, both Long (1983, 1988; in Cross 2002) and Ellis (1990; in Cross 2002) concluded that conscious learning is a contributory factor in SLA. Eventually, receiving adequate evidence in favor of Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis, language teachers can take advantage of stimulating cognitive processes and benefit from the idea in successful teaching/ learning processes by planning instructional syllabuses and educational materials that provide more noticing opportunities for learners on one hand, as well as tasks and strategies that require or attract learners’ conscious attention on the other, in order to facilitate learning. A level of awareness is an essential part of language learning process. This particular level is mentioned by psychologists as ‘attention’ and by linguists as ‘noticing’ (Zhang, 2012). To investigate the effectiveness of attention/noticing in language learning one should consider noticing strategies such as highlighting, think aloud, and reconstruction. The present study investigates whether reconstruction as a noticing process can benefit learners in their writing ability which is really important in communication. ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 310-324, February 2016 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0602.12 © 2016 ACADEMY PUBLICATION