Richard Schmidt

Richard "Dick" Schmidt (died March 15, 2017) was an applied linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, best known for the noticing hypothesis in second language learning, the proposal that learners acquire only what they consciously attend to in the input. After a doctorate in linguistics specializing in Arabic, he spent his career training second and foreign language teachers, with teacher-training projects in Japan, Thailand, Brazil, Spain and Egypt. His research concerned attention, awareness and motivation in adult language learning and the teaching of less commonly taught languages. He directed the university's National Foreign Language Resource Center from 1994 to 2012, served as president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics from 2003 to 2004, and received its Distinguished Service and Scholarship Award in 2009. A 2013 festschrift honored his noticing hypothesis.