ABSTRACT
In most forms of second language instruction, the learning of grammar starts as both declarative and explicit. The role of practice in getting to a sufficiently high level of automatization to enable second language use that is both fluent and almost completely accurate is one of the most central topics in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). Practice itself comes in many varieties. A slightly more elegant definition of declarative versus procedural knowledge, then, is the following: Declarative representations are objects of thought, whereas procedural representations provide the actions to work upon these objects. For the purpose of explaining skill acquisition, however, the main kind of nondeclarative knowledge is procedural knowledge, as opposed to declarative knowledge. Sometimes this process is called automatization in a broad sense, but more technically what happens is first developing procedural knowledge, and then automatizing it. The results are particularly encouraging the longitudinal study and carried out in a real classroom.
