The current study on second language pedagogy promotes a return to some form of grammar instruction, and to tasks which ‘push’ learners to produce meaningful texts while paying attention to grammatical accuracy. Yet there seem to be few classroom-based studies which provide descriptive accounts of students’ engagement in such tasks. The study reported here investigated how 24 tertiary KAP and KSL learners, at intermediate levels, engaged in a text reconstruction task. Based on Rutherford‘s (1987) ‘propositional cluster’, the task required learners to work in groups and reconstruct a text from given content words. The study investigated the type of grammatical items which caused them most concern, and the reasoning they used to arrive at grammatical decisions.