7/27/2019 Bai Critique (Group)

1/2

Journal article critiquing project

There are some strengths and limitations of the journal article Investigating

grammaticality in second language learning: Implications for second language

acquisition research and language testing in terms of organization, content of the

article and its language use.

It can be seen that there are some strengths of this study. First, the article is

coherently organized. It is clear that there are abstract, introductions, critical review,

investigate methodology and conclusion. For example, in the introduction section,

the researcher gives out the reason for writing and the purpose of the paper. Next, the

researcher will investigate whether elicited data obtained from an instrument

designed to measure learners implicit grammatical knowledge yields the same order

of difficulty and measure learners explicit grammatical knowledge manifests the

same or a different order of difficulty. Then the researcher will provide the literature

review in terms of definitions of implicit and explicit second language knowledge,

together with a brief account of processability theory as well as summarise the

previous studies which have demonstrated the validity of the measures obtained.

Finally, the implications of the results for both SLA research and language testing

are considered. With such the introduction clearly states the purpose or scope of the

research and the readers will have an overview of the research as well as a clear and

specific framework of this study is clearly carried out.

Second, it is general that the content of the article is highly evaluated because

the understanding of the status of knowledge of the problem, the rationale, research

methodology and findings of the study is made clear by analyzing, synthesizing and

evaluating. It is clear that the information provided in each section is considered

valid and relevant to this study. For instance, the reason for investigating

grammatical difficulty in second language learning, methods of citations are

relevantly used in this article. Besides that, the essence of the review is clearly

presented that makes the readers get deeply insights into the topics mentioned and

the research methodology is good enough in order to bring the reliability of the

study. In addition, the relevance of each reference to the problem is also explicit.

Third, the article is highly evaluated in terms of language use because

language serving academic writing style is used. For example, the simple past tense

is used to report the findings of past research.

1

7/27/2019 Bai Critique (Group)

2/2

Furthermore, the writing style suits the intended audience, especially for

experts or academic. The article is well-organized, clear and easy to read. All the

important items have been clearly defined and the argument is supported sufficient

evidence.

Last but not least, the results suggested that the measures of implicit and

explicit knowledge are very different: More learners acquire simplest structures as

implicit knowledge, but fewer acquire those structures as explicit knowledge. The

results of the study are valid and reliable because they are analyzed by the instrument:

tests were carried through two methods of the study.

Besides strong points of the journal article mentioned above, its weak points

can be unavoidable. First, it is better for the researcher to change the subject pronoun

I into the researcher because the first person singular is used, which is not

appropriate in academic writing style. Second, the description of five grammar tests is

not only difficult for readers to understand but also shows the complexity for each

grammar test.

To sum up, the journal article seems to be highly evaluated because there are

strong points more than weak points that are discussed in its each section above.

2