ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an in depth report of the heart of any empirical study, namely the research design. It discusses a checklist of the validity criteria for classroom-based research in second language acquisition (SLA) premised on the roles of attention and awareness in L2 development, which will easily generate many questions as we read empirical studies conducted within this attentional framework. It focuses the heart of the research design, namely the level of validity of the study. The premise of the study is that the externally manipulated input will draw substantially more attention to the targeted form from the experimental participants when compared to the attention paid by the control participants. The internal validity of studies addressing internal processes such as attention and awareness that have employed a pretest, exposure, posttest design by describing the failure to operationalize and measure these two internal processes in SLA studies.
