7. dekeyser intro

Introduction: Situating the conceptof practice

Robert M. DeKeyser

Practice gets a raw deal in the field of applied linguistics. Most lay-people simply assume that practice is a necessary condition for languagelearning without giving the concept much further thought, but manyapplied linguists eschew the term practice. For some, the word conjuresup images of mind-numbing drills in the sweatshops of foreign languagelearning, while for others it means fun and games to appease students onFriday afternoons. Practice is by no means a dirty word in other domainsof human endeavor, however. Parents dutifully take their kids to soccerpractice, and professional athletes dutifully show up for team practice,sometimes even with recent injuries. Parents make their kids practice theirpiano skills at home, and the worlds most famous performers of classicalmusic often practice for many hours a day, even if it makes their fingershurt. If even idolized, spoiled, and highly paid celebrities are willing toput up with practice, why not language learners, teachers, or researchers?The concept of second language practice remains remarkably unexam-ined from a theoretical point of view. Misgivings and misunderstandingsabout practice abound and are often rooted in even deeper misunder-standings about what it is that language learners are supposed to learn.In this introductory chapter, I will try to provide some conceptual andterminological clarification in preparation for the rest of the book. In theconcluding chapter, I will then formulate tentative recommendations forthe praxis of practice, as they follow from these conceptual distinctionsand from the other chapters.

It should be clear from the outset, of course, that the word practice inthe title is not meant as the opposite of theory, as in foreign languageteaching policy vs. actual practice in secondary schools, practicingprofessionals, or the praxis of second language teaching. The con-tributors to this book all understand practice in a much more focusedway, as specific activities in the second language, engaged in systemati-cally, deliberately, with the goal of developing knowledge of and skillsin the second language. But within this broad definition there are stillmany different ways one can understand the concept of practice. Beforewe zero in on the meanings of practice in applied linguistics, however,

1

2 Robert M. DeKeyser

let us have a brief look at how cognitive and educational psychologistshave used the term.

The notion of practice in cognitive psychology

The study of skill acquisition is an important area within cognitive psy-chology (for a good, concise overview see Carlson, 2003). Researchersin that area have documented the acquisition of skills in a wide vari-ety of domains, from algebra, geometry, and computer programmingto learning how to drive a car or how to roll cigars. Increasingly, theyalso employ neuroimaging and other neurological data to document howdifferent skills and different stages in the acquisition of the same skillare represented in the brain (e.g., Anderson, Bothell, Byrne, Douglass,Lebiere, & Qin, 2004; Posner, DiGirolamo, & Fernandez-Duque, 1997).Researchers who study skill acquisition processes all agree that reactiontime and error rate decline gradually as a function of practice with agiven task. But how is practice defined in this literature?

Carlson, a well-known contemporary theorist of skill acquisition,defines practice simply as repeated performance of the same (or closelysimilar) routines (1997, p. 56). This definition could easily be misin-terpreted and may seem a throwback to the heydays of behaviorism; itdoes not define practice in terms of cognitive processes at all. Clearly, thiscannot be what Carlson has in mind, however, because he defines skillas the ability to routinely, reliably and fluently perform goal-directedactivities as a result of practice with those activities (1997, p. 45). Thedefinition in Newell and Rosenbloom is more precise: Practice is the sub-class of learning that deals only with improving performance on a taskthat can already be successfully performed (1981, p. 229). Not onlydoes this definition make the learning/improving component of practiceexplicit, it also states clearly that practice in the narrow sense appliesonly to a task that can already be successfully performed. But the defini-tion still remains vague because it does not say what constitutes a task.Is speaking French a task, or requesting a glass of water in French, ordoes using a conditional verb form to do this constitute a task? Any taskoutside the laboratory, whether in school or in the real world, consistsof many components. Could practice be defined as referring to repeatedengaging/improving in task components that can already be successfullyperformed? If so, how narrowly could a task component be defined?And would practice of task components separately be better or worsethan practice of the whole task? There is no general answer to the latterquestion (VanLehn, 1989), but Lee and Anderson (2001), for instance,show how the learning of at least one complex task reflects the learningof much smaller parts.

Situating the concept of practice 3

This brings us to the related question of the specificity of practice effectsin skill learning. If tasks can be defined at such a low level, then howdifferent can they be before they are different altogether? In other words,how much does practice on a task that shares certain characteristics withanother, but also differs from it in a crucial way, contribute to improvingperformance on this other task? What determines transfer of the effect ofpractice? A number of studies have shown that the practice effect is quitespecific in the sense that there is only minimal transfer between tasksthat superficially appear to be each others mirror image, such as writingversus reading a computer program (see esp. Singley & Anderson, 1989;cf. also Anderson, 1993, chap. 9; Muller, 1999).

This specificity of the practice effect is explained by the well-knowndistinction between declarative and procedural knowledge. In most formsof skill acquisition, people are first presented with information, e.g.,rules about how to write a computer program or put a French sentencetogether in explicit form (declarative knowledge). Through initialpractice they incorporate this information into behavioral routines (pro-duction rules, procedural knowledge). This procedural knowledgeconsists of very specific rules and can be used fast and with a low errorrate, but the disadvantage is its lack of generalizability.

Once established, procedural knowledge can become automatized.Automatization is a rather difficult concept because the term is usedat three levels of generality, at least. In the broadest sense, it refers to thewhole process of knowledge change from initial presentation of the rulein declarative format to the final stage of fully spontaneous, effortless,fast, and errorless use of that rule, often without being aware of it any-more. In a narrower sense, it refers to the slow process of reducing errorrate, reaction time, and interference with/from other tasks that takesplace after proceduralization. In the most specific sense, it designates amerely quantitative change in the subcomponents of procedural knowl-edge to the exclusion of any qualitative change or restructuring (i.e.,excluding changes in which small subcomponents make up procedu-ral knowledge at a given stage of skill development or how they worktogether).

Automatization in the last two meanings of the word is characterizedby the power law of practice: regardless of the domain of learning, bothreaction time and error rate decline over time according to a very specificfunction that is mathematically defined as a power function; hence theterm (see esp. Anderson, 2000; Newell & Rosenbloom, 1981). While theexact nature of the processes underlying the shape of this function (e.g.,quantitative vs. qualitative change) is still a matter of debate, and whilesome question the universality of the power law (see esp. Anderson,2000; Delaney, Reder, Staszewski, & Ritter, 1998; Haider & Frensch,2002; Logan, 1988, 1992, 2002; Palmeri, 1997, 1999; Rickard, 1997,


1999, 2004), all agree that reaction time and error rate (some studies alsodocument decreased interference with/from simultaneous tasks) declinegradually as a function of practice with a given task.

The more automatized procedural knowledge becomes the clearerthese effects. The transfer found between program reading/writing or,in the case of L2 learning, between production/comprehension skills,then, is explained by the fact that practice in each skill reinforces tosome extent the declarative knowledge that is applicable to both. Theprocedural knowledge, however, is too specific to be transferred fromone skill to another; therefore, the practice effect is highly skill-specific.

It should be pointed out here that automatized knowledge is not exactlythe same as implicit knowledge. While implicit knowledge or implicitmemory is always defined with reference to lack of consciousness orawareness (see, e.g., Reingold & Ray, 2003), absence of awareness isnot a requirement for automaticity. Hence, one can have knowledge thatis implicit but not automatic (because error rate is too high and speedis too low) in cases of incomplete implicit learning (the pattern may bemerely probabilistic, so the learner feels unsure, hesitates, and often getsit wrong). On the other hand, one can have knowledge that is automaticbut not implicit (because the learner has attained high speed and lowerror rate but is still conscious of rules, for instance, because he or she isa language teacher, whether of L1 or L2, or a linguist).

A further question concerns the nature of the practice effect for rel-atively complex tasks: Does it reflect speeding up small components(automatization in the narrowest sense), changing the nature of smallcomponents (restructuring), speeding up the way they work together,or changing the nature of how they work together (strategic change)?Increasingly, researchers find that automatization in the narrowest senseis probably much more limited than often assumed and that attention issubject to a far greater degree of top-down control (Pashler, Johnston, &Ruthruff, 2001, p. 648).

In the same way that it is hard to decide whether and how to breakup a task into components to be practiced separately, it is hard to decidehow often to provide feedback on performance in complex tasks. Wulf,Schmidt, and Deubel (1993) found that constant feedback was betterfor learning fine parameters of a task, whereas intermittent feedback(63 percent of the time) was better for learning the task as a whole. Asthis study involved a perceptual-motor task, it is unclear to what extentits findings would generalize to a cognitive skill such as language learning,however. Moreover, decisions need to be made about when to providefeedback. On the one hand, immediate feedback may disrupt the execu-tion of higher-order routines that are also being learned (cf. Schooler &Anderson 1990, quoted in Anderson, 2000), but on the other hand, feed-back should not be delayed too much because it may be most efficient


when it is provided while the procedural knowledge that led to theerror is still active in memory. Most importantly, perhaps, a substantialamount of evidence suggests that what is best for improving performancein the short run can be worst in the long run, especially for transfer. Lessfrequent feedback leads to less immediate improvement but to better per-formance in the long run, at least for a variety of perceptual and motortasks (Schmidt & Bjork, 1992). Needless to say, eventual performanceand transfer are more important in real life and even to some extent inschool contexts than short-term performance.

The notion of practice in educational psychology

Educators and educational psychologists do not doubt the importance ofpractice. Even during the heydays of the cognitive revolution, Ausubel,Novak, and Hanesian wrote:

Although much significant meaningful learning obviously occurs during initialpresentation of the instructional material, both overlearning and most long-term retention presuppose multiple presentations of trials (practice). Bothlearning process and outcome customarily encompass various qualitative andquantitative changes that take place during these several trials. Learning andretention, therefore, ordinarily imply practice. Such practice, furthermore, istypically specific (restricted to the learning task) and deliberate (intentional).(1978, p. 311)

Much more recently, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, for instance,stated that in deliberate practice, a student works under a tutor (humanor computer based) to rehearse appropriate practices that enhance perfor-mance (1999, p. 166) and pointed out that deliberate practice can lead toan enormous reduction in the time it takes individuals to reach real-worldperformance criteria. Ericsson and associates (Ericsson, Krampe, &Tesch-Romer, 1993; Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Starkes & Ericsson,2003; see also Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996) have docu-mented in astounding detail the enormous amount of deliberate practiceit takes to become a truly expert performer such as a world-class musi-cian, chess player, or athlete. Others (e.g., Maguire, Valentine, Wilding, &Kapur, 2003; Wilding & Valentine, 1997; cf. also Ericsson, 2003) havedocumented large effects of deliberate practice in performance of highlyspecific memory tasks.

As is often the case, however, terminology varies from author to author.Legge, for instance, makes a distinction between practice, which maysimply involve using the skills that have been acquired, sometimesimperfectly (1986, p. 228), and training, which involves a deliber-ate scheme to assist learning. On the other hand, Haskell (2001) gives


training a more narrow, negative meaning of drilling or teaching recipes,which leads to the well-known lack of transfer. It should be clearthat we will use the term practice in a sense that is both narrowerthan Legges (for we are dealing with activities planned to assist initiallearning of new elements of a language) and much broader than meredrilling (for we include a variety of loosely structured communicativeactivities).

A large part of the educational literature on practice concerns the issueof transfer, whether it be from one classroom task to another or from theclassroom to performance on the job. A central concept here is that oftransfer-appropriate processing: transfer is likely to occur to the extentthat the cognitive operations involved in the new context, task, or testrecapitulate or overlap with those engaged in during initial learning (see,e.g., Whittlesea & Dorken, 1993). Knowledge that is overly contex-tualized can reduce transfer; abstract representations of knowledge canhelp promote transfer (Bransford et al., 1999, p. 41). One particularform that this problem can take is that of trying to teach proceduralknowledge without an adequate declarative base. Singley and Anderson(1989) point out not only that transfer between related skills such asreading and writing computer programs is limited but that where it doeshappen it appears to occur via declarative knowledge of the underlyingrules. If a student only grasps a problem through a limited number ofexamples, learning may be quick but transfer is doubtful. If the principleor rule underlying the examples is thoroughly understood, transfer willbe much easier, but examples are still necessary for establishing usableknowledge (see esp. Anderson, Fincham, & Douglass, 1997). With-out an adequate level of initial learning, transfer cannot be expected.The point seems obvious, but it is often overlooked (Bransford et al.,1999, p. 41).

On the other hand, narrow procedural knowledge, while it is less gen-eralizable, is not only the most efficient in those contexts where it isapplicable but it is also more durable (Healy, King, Clawson, Sinclair,Rickard, Crutcher et al., 1995; Healy, Barshi, Crutcher, Tao, Rickard,Marmie et al., 1998).

The concept of practice in applied linguistics

Few applied linguists have attempted to define what exactly consti-tutes practice. Ellis has been among the most explicit. He states thatpractice . . . involves an attempt to supply the learner with plentifulopportunities for producing targeted structures in controlled and free lan-guage use in order to develop fully proceduralized implicit knowledge(1993, p. 109). This may seem uncontroversial, but what Ellis says in


the next few sentences makes it clear that the concept is far from obvi-ous. Because of the emphasis he puts on procedural knowledge, he takesthe point of view that (production) practice is important for teaching pro-nunciation and formulaic knowledge but not for the teaching of gram-mar rules: What is being challenged here is the traditional role it hasplayed in the teaching of grammatical items (p. 109). This point of view,of course, reflects the Chomskyan distinction between competence andperformance: practice is to improve performance, not to teach compe-tence, the most prototypical form of which is our intuitive knowledge ofgrammar rules. This competence has always been seen as either acquiredor not, but not something gradual; furthermore, once something has beenacquired, Chomskyan theory sees it as available for use in performance,except for certain constraints on the latter which are considered to bebeyond the scope of linguistics proper (see e.g., Chomsky, 1965, p. 3;1980; 1986, chaps. 1 and 2).

The Chomsky/Ellis point of view, however, is at odds with both thecognitive psychology of skill acquisition and much current theorizing inapplied linguistics, most notably with VanPattens theory of input pro-cessing. Cognitive psychologists stress the role of practice in transform-ing declarative/explicit knowledge into procedural/implicit knowledge.Clearly, it is implicit knowledge that corresponds to the Chomskyannotion of linguistic competence, not explicit, and clearly practice isneeded to achieve it, unless one believes it is also acquired completelyimplicitly and Ellis does not seem to believe that: Perhaps we do nothave to bother with trying to teach implicit knowledge directly (2002,p. 234).

VanPattens theory of input processing (e.g., 1996, 2003), on the otherhand, clearly aims at building the procedural knowledge needed for theuse of grammar rules in comprehension after the declarative knowledgeof these rules has been taught explicitly. (VanPattens thinking is clearlyin line with skill acquisition theory on this point; whether this proceduralknowledge transfers easily to production skills is a different matter, aswill be discussed.) Ellis himself appears to have shifted recently toward aless radical competence /performance, rule /item, declarative /procedural,implicit /explicit view: Production, then, may constitute the mechanismthat connects the learners dual systems, enabling movement to occurfrom the memory-based to the rule-based system and vice versa. If thisinterpretation is correct, learners may not be so reliant on input as hasbeen generally assumed in SLA. They may be able to utilize their owninternal resources, via using them in production, to both construct andcomplexify their interlanguages (2003, p. 115). This also seems to bethe position of Diane Larsen-Freeman: Output practice, then, does notsimply serve to increase access to previously acquired knowledge. Doingand learning are synchronous (2003, p. 114).


As previously stated, in this book we define practice as specific activ-ities in the second language engaged in systematically, deliberately, withthe goal of developing knowledge of and skills in the second language.Contributors to this volume put different emphases on the importanceof practicing what one already knows in principle (see Legges definitionabove, and the chapters by Muranoi and DeKeyser in this volume) versusdeliberately engaging in tasks that are supposed to draw attention to newphenomena or engender new insights (see esp. the chapters by Leow andMackey in this volume). As Robinson (this volume) points out, the twoprocesses typically go together anyhow. While accessing existing knowl-edge, the learner becomes aware of gaps or inconsistencies in it, whichmay lead to restructuring or expansion of this knowledge, potentially byincorporation of input from a native-speaking interlocutor.

Issues surrounding practice in applied linguistics

While much of the literature quoted in the first two sections of this chap-ter is couched in language that may be unfamiliar to second languageacquisition researchers, parallels abound between the questions asked incognitive and educational psychology and those that bedevil our ownfield. How skill-specific and how task-specific is the effect of practice;in other words, how much transfer can be expected? How much feed-back should be given, how, and at what time to maximize the effect ofpractice? Can explicit knowledge be automatized through practice tothe point of becoming equivalent to implicit acquired knowledge? Howdoes automaticity develop in the course of practice? These issues will beoutlined here and discussed in more depth in the final chapter of thisbook.

Complete answers to these questions are not available in large partbecause empirical research on practice has been quite limited in recentdecades. Between the bad memories of audiolingual mechanical drillsand the subsequent emphases in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s on authen-tic communication, focus on meaning, and task-based learning, fewresearchers in the post-audiolingual period have addressed the issue ofpractice head-on (cf. also Larsen-Freeman, 2003, pp. 102 and 106).

The skill-specificity issue is probably the one that has drawn themost attention in applied linguistics lately (see esp. DeKeyser, Salaberry,Robinson, & Harrington, 2002; Izumi, 2002, 2003; Muranoi, thisvolume; VanPatten, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2004). Cognitive psychologyhas much to say about the specificity of skills (see esp. Anderson, 1993;Anderson & Fincham, 1994; Anderson, Fincham, & Douglass, 1997;Muller, 1999; Singley & Anderson, 1989), but of course its findings can-not be transferred blindly to issues of second language acquisition. Both


Ellis (1992, 1993, but see the 2003 quote on page 7) and VanPatten (seeesp. VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993; VanPatten & Oikkenon, 1996) takethe view that while input practice leads to acquisition, output practicemerely serves to improve fluency. On the other hand, studies such as thoseby DeKeyser (1997), DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996), and Izumi (2002)clearly show a lack of transfer between receptive and productive skills atthe level of both proceduralized and automatized knowledge.

The problem of transfer, discussed so often in cognitive psychology andeven more in educational psychology, applies also at the broader level oftransfer from declarative knowledge to procedural skill and of knowledgeand skill from one context to another, in particular from the classroom tothe native-speaking environment. Transfer from declarative knowledgeto procedural skill has been discussed very widely (see e.g., Carroll, 2001;DeKeyser, 1997, 2003; Doughty, 2003; Ellis, 1992, 1993, 2003; Hulstijn,2002; Krashen, 1982, 1999; McLaughlin, 1987; Skehan, 1998), and isoften referred to as the interface issue. A typical case of the other kindof transfer, from the classroom context to the real world, is, of course,the semester abroad context. Research on the latter topic illustrates boththat this transfer is far from obvious and that study abroad is not asobviously ideal for practicing foreign language skills as is often assumed(see esp. Brecht & Robinson, 1993; Brecht, Davidson, & Ginsberg, 1995;DeKeyser, this volume). DeKeyser argues that these two transfer issues,from one kind of knowledge and skill to another and from one contextto another, are intertwined in study abroad programs.

Another prominent issue already mentioned is the separation of a com-plex skill into separate components in terms of teaching, practicing, andproviding feedback. Most L2 teaching methodologies of the last 30 years,such as communicative language teaching, the natural approach, andtask-based learning, are much less inclined to take language apart intosmall components than was the case for older methods such as grammar-translation, audiolingualism, or cognitive code. But what exactly the idealpoint is on the analytic/synthetic dimension of curriculum design, andwhat this implies for practice activities, is still far from resolved, espe-cially in the foreign language context (see esp. Ortega, this volume).

The usefulness of feedback in general, and of specific techniques suchas explicit error correction, negotiation of meaning, or recasts has beenthe subject of much debate in applied linguistics but has only recentlybecome the subject of a considerable number of empirical studies (see esp.Iwashita, 2003; Leeman, 2003; Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada, 2001;Pica & Washburn, 2002). It appears from this literature that feedbacktends to have a substantial positive effect (see esp. Leeman, this volume,and the meta-analysis in Russell & Spada, 2006), but the amount ofempirical evidence gathered so far is insufficient to answer more spe-cific questions about when and how to give feedback with any degree


of certainty. Clearly, we need to know more about these questions, andabout others, which have hardly been addressed at all. How useful isfeedback for different elements of language, not just for pronunciationversus grammar versus vocabulary, but even, say, for rules versus itemsversus prototypes, simple rules versus complex rules, frequent items ver-sus infrequent items? And, perhaps most important, how should the fre-quency and the nature of feedback be adapted to the stage of learning orskill acquisition? Much work remains to be done in this area.

Automatization, on the other hand, is an issue that has not drawn muchfocused attention yet, let alone provided the accumulation of evidencethat is needed to guide practice. As argued on page 3, automatization inthe broad sense has many faces. In applied linguistics these are illustrated,for instance, in the work of Healy et al. (1998), who show that strategyshifts from rules to items as well as from items to rules can both occuras a result of ample practice with linguistic structures, and in that ofDeKeyser (1997), who shows that automatization in a more narrow sensecan take place for second language grammar rules following the samepower-function learning curve documented in the acquisition of skillsin other domains. Many questions remain, however, especially aboutthe integration of such findings from a skill acquisition perspective withfindings from the second language acquisition literature.

While the acquisition of complex skills, skill specificity, skill transfer,feedback on performance, and automatization of skills are issues forwhich applied linguists can certainly find much inspiration in the cogni-tive and educational literature, we also face a number of difficult choicesthat are characteristic of second language teaching, such as the relation-ship between form and meaning and the difference between teachingform and teaching forms. Clearly, form-meaning connections are theessence of language, and taking them apart more than necessary forpractice activities would be unwise, but there are areas of language suchas phonetics, phonology, and morphological paradigms where narrowlyfocused, repeated practice activities with forms can be useful (DeKeyser,1998). Such practice activities have traditionally been called drills.They have been alternately advocated, demonized, derided, and resusci-tated, often even without making the distinction between different kindsof drills.

As (talking about) drilling has been so out of fashion for a numberof years, it may be good to remind some younger readers of this vol-ume of the three-way distinction made by several authors after the con-cern for communicative language teaching became well established butbefore it evolved, at least at the level of academic debate, into an almostexclusive focus on meaning. Paulston (1970, 1972; cf. also Paulston &Bruder, 1976) made a three-way distinction between mechanical, mean-ingful, and communicative drills (MMC). Mechanical drills were defined


as drills where there is complete control of the response and only onecorrect way of responding (1976, p. 3). Such drills can be carried outwithout any knowledge of the L2 or even any understanding of the rulebeing practiced by mere superficial analogy; replacing all lexemes withnonsense words would leave the drill intact. Meaningful drills are verydifferent in the sense that the student cannot complete these drills with-out fully understanding structurally and semantically what is being said(p. 7). In other words, they require that the student access the form-meaning links characteristic of the L2 in order to understand what isasked and to respond with an answer that is correct not only in termsof form but also in terms of intended meaning. In communicative drillsthere is still control over the structures used by the student, but the imme-diate goal from the students point of view becomes actual exchange ofinformation: the student is telling the teacher or other students some-thing they did not know. The main difference between a meaningfuldrill and a communicative drill is that in the latter the speaker adds newinformation about the real world (p. 9).

Byrne (1986) also made a three-way distinction between presentation,practice, and production (PPP). It is clear from Byrnes discussion (esp.p. 5), however, that the practice stage roughly corresponds to Andersonsproceduralization stage, and the production stage to automatization. Inother words, PPP is completely different from MMC: presentation pre-cedes MMC, practice combines the mechanical and meaningful, and pro-duction includes but goes beyond the communicative in MMC (becauseit goes beyond drills).

As I have argued previously (DeKeyser, 1998), mechanical drills canonly serve a very limited purpose, because they do not make the learnerengage in what is the essence of language processing, i.e., establishingform-meaning connections. Far too often, however, all drills are equatedwith mechanical drills. The debate between Wong and VanPatten (2003,2004) and Leaver, Rifkin, and Shekhtman (2004) clearly illustrates thispoint: where Wong and VanPatten saved their sharpest criticisms formechanical drills, other kinds of drills appeared to be guilty by associa-tion, which led to the reaction by Leaver, Rifkin, and Shekhtman.

While we did not include the idea of multiple repetition as impliedby drills as a necessary component of our definition of practice (seeabove) any more than the idea of mechanical practice, we definitely donot exclude it either. It is an element of the definition used by cogni-tive psychologists such as Carlson (see above), it continues to be animportant element of the praxis of practice all over the world, and itis gradually gaining respectability again in empirical research on secondlanguage learning (e.g., Bygate, 2001; Gass, Mackey, Alvarez-Torres, &Fernandez-Garca, 1999; Lynch & Maclean, 2000, 2001; Van den Bran-den, 1997; see also Van den Branden, this volume).


The real question is not so much whether repeated performance of anarrowly construed task has a role to play in second language learning,but how strongly form-focused activities such as drills should be inte-grated into the curriculum without reverting to a structural syllabus thatmerely teaches the structure of the day or becoming obsessed witha mere focus on forms instead of focus on form (see esp. Doughty &Williams, 1998; Long 1988; Long & Robinson, 1998). Discussions oftask-based learning (Ellis, 2003; Long & Crookes, 1992; Long & Norris,2000; Skehan, 1996; Wesche & Skehan, 2002), in particular, continueto deal with this issue.

Finally, as the table of contents for this book suggests, the need forand usefulness of different kinds of practice varies considerably depend-ing on the institutional context and the characteristics of the individuallearner. Second language teaching, foreign language teaching, bilingualimmersion programs, and study abroad are all characterized by their ownopportunities for and constraints on practice, and students of differentages, with quantitative and qualitative differences in aptitude, can benefitdifferentially from different forms of practice.

Far from being an outdated concept, then, practice stands at the cross-roads where many different questions intersect: questions about the rela-tionship between competence and performance, implicit and explicitlearning, production and comprehension, analytic versus synthetic syl-labi, accuracy versus fluency, and about individualization of instruction.

The structure of this volume

The first section in the book discusses the basic forms of practice and feed-back that are applicable to most circumstances, whether they emphasizeinput or output. The second section deals with variations in institutionalcontext and what impact they have on conditions for different kindsof practice. The third section discusses how practice activities could beadapted to differences in age and aptitude between learners. Short intro-ductions to the issues dealt with in the individual chapters can be foundat the beginning of each of these sections. The final chapter of this bookdraws together the findings from the previous sections against the back-ground of the conceptual distinctions made in the introductory chapterand provides a differentiated view of what constitutes good L2 skill prac-tice. The book ends with a glossary, which provides definitions of termsused in more than one chapter in this book along with some core conceptsfrom individual chapters.

While the concept of practice certainly applies to the four skills oflistening, speaking, reading, and writing, many chapters in this bookfocus on oral skills, largely because that is where the issue of practice has


been perceived as most problematic and has generated the most empiri-cal research and theoretical debate. Even there, however, much remainsto be done. While much SLA research has dealt with oral input, thereis little empirical research on systematic listening practice learning tolisten and listening to learn have been seen as very different issues (cf.Vandergrift, 2004). At present a [second language] course based pri-marily on psychological principles has not been realized (Healy et al.,1998). It is the aim of this book to contribute to such a goal.

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