An important issue in the teaching of writing is whether students should prepare a plan before they start writing. Teacher guides generally recommend pre-task planning (PTP) but with provisos. Research that has investigated PTP, however, does not lend unconditional support to PTP. This article takes a look at the research and draws from it a…

As Larsen-Freeman (2018) wrote in her own historical account of second language acquisition (SLA) 'it is important to understand ideas at the time they originated' (p. 56). This is certainly true of the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Rod Ellis adds that it is also important to understand how the ideas that motivated a field of enquiry…

This article reports a classroom-based study of the effects of two types of corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of 3rd person "-s." One hundred and nine Chinese university students completed three communicative tasks: One group received implicit CF consisting of a single corrective move (implicit recasts), a second group received…

This article presents a review of research that has investigated ways of measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language (L2), focusing on grammar. It begins by defining implicit and explicit knowledge in terms of a distinguishing set of criteria. Two ways of investigating implicit knowledge are discussed -- through experimental…