| Summary: | Within the framework of explicit learning and consciousness-raising, this study investigates patterns in the use of -<i>le</i> in authentic classroom tasks by beginner-level learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). It also explores the role and the processes of student-centered consciousness-raising in explicit knowledge building. Twenty-five participants completed a grammaticality judgment task, an interactive role-play task, and a written editing task. The experiment group received role-play sheets with explicit forms of -<i>le</i> provided, and participants engaged in rule induction of -<i>le</i> in forbidden context in the role-play session. Results showed that beginner-level learners’ difficulty with -<i>le</i> use manifested in different ways in these tasks, and -<i>le</i> underuse occurred more than overuse in the control group’s oral role-play task. Consciousness-raising through unguided small group rule induction supported participants’ learning of -<i>le</i> usage constraints, shown by differences between the control and experiment groups’ performances in the posttest. Through a qualitative analysis of participants’ analytical talk transcripts, the processes and outcomes of small group rule induction are examined and discussed.
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