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.

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.