An Empirical Study On Implicit And Explicit Instructions Through Drama Activities

The core of the issues of whether to teach grammar and how it should be taught is the controversial debate between explicit instruction and implicit instruction for several decades. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how and to what extent the effects conducted by Chinese English learners acquire two grammatical structures via class drama activities under the implicit and explicit instructions. In addition, the study also intends to find out to what extent the effects of explicit and implicit instructions on the target two grammatical structures can remain in the long term.This empirical study, consisted of four kinds of tests within two months, focused on the acquisition of two different grammar structures:relative clauses and conditional clauses through drama activities in an actual second language classroom. The 76 subjects involved in this study from a relatively-high level high school in Shanghai, received treatment on relative clauses and conditional clauses, respectively by explicit instruction and implicit instruction. They were arranged to take English-proficiency-Test, pre-test, post-test and post-delayed-test, as well as an English writing task during the whole procedure.The analysis of the data includes both statistic quantitative and qualitative analysis.The results of f-test and t-test show that:first, there is no significant difference between implicit and explicit instructions on the target structures based on the performance of the post-test, while the explicit group generally outperform implicit group. Second, the relative clauses show no significantly different learning difficulties either it was taught by the implicit instruction or the explicit instruction.Third, the correct form of conditional clauses is easy to be learnt through explicit instruction rather than implicit instruction.However, in the long run, the frequencies of its usage by those students who received implicit instruction are higher than the other group. Fourth, in the long term, these two instructions show no significant difference on these two target structures.Besides, the majority of the subjects prefer the explicit instruction in drama activity as it is clear about the objective and the rules. Teachers also present the difficulties in using implicit instruction in drama activity. However, both teachers and the students agree that the implicit instruction could arouse students'interests to some extent. The study concludes that the explicit and implicit instructions are effective for learning the target structures. Perhaps the combination of these two instructions in English teaching/learning will benefit a lot since they have various effects for English grammar learning on different learning stages. The findings of the study show some help to teachers in EFL classroom and also provide some actual data for curriculum reformers and course designers.