Chapter 11 provides an overview of the terms for talking about grammar instruction and learning, including implicit learning vs. explicit learning and implicit knowledge vs. explicit knowledge. With these common terms defined, the chapter then describes several instructional approaches that researchers have utilized to better understand how language learners build their understanding of the target language. Particular attention is paid to focus-on-form and form-focused instructional strategies.

Working memory, as a cognitive function, needs to be understood within the context of the mind as a whole, in other words within a general framework that can connect it to related research and theory. In this chapter we present one such broad view of the mind, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), and apply it to the study of working memory, emphasizing its involvement in language development and use. We consider the nature of working memory as an integral part of the cognitive system, along with working memory capacity, offering a relatively fine-grained, cognitively contextualized account of what working memory is and where the capacity limits come from. This approach provides a means of understanding and further studying a range of phenomena, including the nature and use of metalinguistic knowledge, bilingual language “selection”, code-switching, switch costs and their absence, crosslinguistic influence, optionality in second language learning, and translation and interpreting.