While the noticing function of output has been increasingly researched by a number of applied linguists, the nature of such noticing and its effect on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated. In a four-stage writing task consisting of output, comparison, and two revisions, this study examined what Japanese college students spontaneously noticed (1) as they wrote a story in response to a picture prompt (Stage 1), and (2) as they compared their original writing to two native-speaker models (Stage 2), and how such noticing affected their immediate and delayed revisions (Stages 3 and 4). The results suggest that the participants noticed overwhelmingly lexical features as they autonomously identified their respective problems, found solutions through models, and incorporated them in subsequent revisions. Regarding proficiency effects, more proficient learners noticed significantly more features than less proficient learners when they compared their original output with two models. Another finding was that, among the features of the models that the participants noticed, those that were related to the problems that they had noticed through output were incorporated at a higher rate and were also retained longer than unrelated features. Implications drawn from these findings are discussed.

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