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…

The article reports on a study investigating the comparative effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback in learning the English past passive construction, a linguistic structure of which the learners had little prior knowledge. A total of 120 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from 4 intact classes at a Chinese middle school…

The author has worked as a language teacher, teacher educator, and second language acquisition (SLA) researcher for over forty years. During this time grammar has figured largely in his thinking, in part because it has traditionally been so central to language pedagogy and in part because he became fascinated with how the human mind grapples with…

There is a wealth of literature examining the role of motivation in second language (L2) learning but remarkably little research that has examined how teachers can foster motivation in the classroom. For this reason alone Guilloteaux and Dornyei's (2008) correlational study of the relationship between motivational strategies and student motivation…

In contrast to the usual approach to teaching grammar, this article argues for a comprehension-based approach. Based on a model of second-language acquisition, it examines a number of possible goals for grammar instruction (e.g., to promote "intake" of new grammatical features by helping learners notice input features and comprehend the meaning).…

This article reviews previous studies of the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on SLA, pointing out a number of methodological problems. It then reports on a new study of the effects of these two types of corrective feedback on the acquisition of past tense -ed. In an experimental design (two experimental groups and a control…