SKILL LEARNING THEORIES AND LANGUAGE TEACHING: Different Strokes for Different Folks

Drawing on skill learning research in various fields, I argue that memory retrieval routines that individual learners have established prior to communicative practice, in either the classroom or an experiment, may mediate ways in which they process L2 information and feedback during practice. Consequently, the same communicative task may have differing impacts on (a) learners who learned the target language in a traditional way that might have established declarative memory retrieval routines, and (b) learners from an immersion context where they have developed procedural memory retrieval routines. I argue that this hypothesis explains the mixed findings of practice and feedback studies and underscores the importance of L2 instruction that considers the learning backgrounds of individual learners.