On Situating the Stance of Practice in SLA

The study of skill acquisition, as DeKeyser (1997) declares, is an important area within cognitive psychology. What is undeniable in skill acquisition is the fact that through extensive practice, the degree of attention on a task decreases and the task is performed without stopping; furthermore, the rate of error considerably decreases. The paper, in an attempt to work on situating the concept of practice in skill acquisition, goes on to hold that since each context has its own specific encoding cues, and that the skill achieved in that specific context is too specific to be transferred to other contexts, the degree of automaticity in employing the skill in that context is plausibly more than the other contexts.