In her article, Icy Lee (2019, pp. 524-536) discusses the differences between comprehensive written corrective feedback (CWCF) and focused written corrective feedback (FWCF). She argues that teachers should concentrate more on focused feedback, and highlight and correct only a few grammar errors or issues with organisation, for example, instead of…

In her position article, Lee (2019) compellingly argues for focused written corrective feedback (FWCF) and offers clear guidelines for teachers to shift their feedback approach. As English language teaching practitioners in Chinese universities, we share Lee's view against any unthinking adherence to comprehensive written corrective feedback…

Professor of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Robert DeKeyser is from the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland. His research builds bridges between the theory of second language acquisition with major concerns in cognitive aspects such as implicit and explicit learning mechanism, age differences, and…

Icy Lee is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she is currently serving as Chairperson of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her main research interests are in the areas of second language writing and second language teacher education. Icy is best known for her research on feedback in L2…

Goo and Mackey (this issue) outline several apparent design flaws in studies that have compared the impact of different types of corrective feedback (CF). Furthermore, they argue that SLA researchers should stop comparing recasts to other types of CF because they are inherently different kinds of phenomena. Our response to their article addresses…

In this closing commentary, I first briefly recognize areas that have made the dialogue between the fields of second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA) difficult in the past. I then offer some comments on the interfaces that are brought to the fore by the contributions gathered in the special issue. The themes explored are…

In a recent paper, Anthony Bruton argued that correction receives too much attention and that the debate over it (which he calls "the Truscott debate") is "a rather tedious sterile academic debate" that has harmed the field. He dismissed the case against correction, based on arguments that uncorrected students do not improve, some general…

In this response I discuss several points that Bruton made in his own response paper. I first argue that his main theme, that design factors should be emphasized over statistical analysis, has never been a genuine issue; it is two independent issues, and for each of them I have some concerns about his discussion. I then consider his comments on…

Intelligent language tutoring systems (ILTS) typically analyze learner input to diagnose learner language properties and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research, such systems are virtually absent from real-life foreign language teaching (FLT). Taking a step toward more closely linking ILTS research to real-life…

In this paper we argue in favour of teaching English as a second language to the Bengali learners with direct utilisation of English corpora. The proposed strategy is meant to be assisted with computer and is based on data, information, and examples retrieved from the present-day English corpora developed with various text samples composed by…

This paper presents a critical analysis of two recent studies on error correction, Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, and Takashima (2008) and Bitchener (2008) and argues that neither study constitutes evidence for error correction based on discussion of the comparability of participants, design issues, and analysis flaws in both studies. The paper further…

In the research conducted by Truscott and Hsu (2008), the authors demonstrate that although rewriting corrected drafts results in lower grammar error rates on the rewritten texts, this effect does not carry over to a subsequent new writing task. The authors conclude that the result indicates that there may have been no language improvement from…

While programs have been established to support secondary level English Learners (ELs) in their transition to institutions of higher education (IHEs), limited attention has been given to how to support adult ELs who struggle with the academic language demands of their college or university content-area courses. Research indicates that many EL…

Error diagnosis in ICALL typically analyzes learner input in an attempt to abstract and identify indicators of the learner's (mis)conceptions of linguistic properties. For written input, this process usually starts with the identification of tokens that will serve as the atomic building blocks of the analysis. In this paper, we discuss the…

Using the British "Index to Theses", we found forty-seven Ph.D.s relating to second and foreign language learning and/or teaching defended in English universities in 2006. Objective criteria led us to fourteen theses which had investigated both teaching and learning. Over half of these adopted a process-product research design with the…