Skip to content

Time-pressured picture-cued writing tasks elicit obligatory article use for measuring implicit knowledge.

Design · All designs
Evidence · no claims cited

Description

A time-pressured picture-cued writing test was used to measure learners' implicit knowledge of English articles. Students wrote a coherent story of at least 150 words based on 10 sequential pictures, with word prompts given for each picture to elicit noun phrases with English articles. The Target-Like-Use formula (Pica, 1991) was applied to calculate accuracy of use. Three different sets of sequential pictures were used for pretest, Posttest 1, and Posttest 2 to investigate whether written CF helps learners improve their linguistic accuracy in a new piece of writing.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

  • Sequential pictures with word prompts eliciting obligatory occasions for 'a(n)' and 'the'
  • Time pressure of 30 minutes
  • Target-Like-Use formula applied for scoring

Constraints

  • Writing tasks, even when pressured, cannot afford a convincing measure of implicit knowledge because they allow for controlled processing and monitoring for accuracy (Shintani & Ellis, 2013)

Target Learners

  • low-intermediate EFL learners

Learning Goals

  • implicit knowledge of English articles

Claims

Examples

-

Key Sources

  • Lin Jiang & Hailing Xiao. (2014). The Efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback and Language Analytic Ability on Chinese Learners’ Explicit and Implicit Knowledge of English Articles. English Language Teaching, 7(10). http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v7n10p22
Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id picture-cued-writing-task-implicit-knowledge
title Time-pressured picture-cued writing tasks elicit obligatory article use for measuring implicit knowledge.
description A time-pressured picture-cued writing test was used to measure learners' implicit knowledge of English articles.
status review
generated by process:settle-candidates on 2026-11-03
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — lin-jiang-hailing-xiao-2014

Frontmatter is the page's machine-readable record — see the Schema & Guide.