This paper draws on an approach that conceptualizes L2 learning difficulty in terms of implicit and explicit knowledge. In a study with L1 Mexican Spanish university-level learners (n=30), their teachers (n=11) and applied linguistics experts (n=3), we investigated the relationship between (a) these groups' difficulty judgements of 13 selected L2 English structures and (b) perceived learning difficulty and learners' actual performance on measures of implicit and explicit knowledge. Our findings show that experts' learning difficulty judgements did not lead to significant predictions, while the learners' own difficulty rankings correlated significantly with their performance on the measure of explicit knowledge.Although correlations based on teachers' difficulty rankings did not reach statistical significance, the judgements of this group were the only ones which showed trends towards successful prediction of learners' performance on both the implicit and the explicit L2 measures. Thus, the teachers exhibited a trend towards the best overall prediction ability.
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