Effects Of Implicit And Explicit Grammatical Knowledge Teaching On Chinese College Students’ English Writing

Writing ability is always one of the most important signs of the English communication abilities when students’ comprehensive abilities in grammar and vocabulary are inspected. Meanwhile, writing practices the ability of thinking, expressing and organizing, which can measure their comprehensive strength. Writing is able to judge the comprehensive power of each student in English learning area, in a manner of speaking. Grammar is of great importance in English writing because the sentence cannot be expressed well and organized well without correct grammatical structure, nor can articles become articles. Along with the development of Second Language Acquisition, many new concepts show up with many outstanding problems in order to increase their English writing abilities. After lone-time researches, scholars still stick to their own views so there aren’t many researches on how to associate explicit grammar teaching and implicit grammar teaching with college English writing. Explicit teaching is simply applied to traditional English teaching method but this has to be changed.Although some researchers have discussed the definition and its testing method about implicit grammatical knowledge and studied its functions during the development of second language, the researches on implicit grammar teaching are still very few. Nowadays the explicit way is commonly used in grammar teaching, so the study on whether the implicit teaching will help to improve students’ writing ability or not is significant for second language learning and teaching. Based on this, this paper explores two main questions:1) For the time being, what are the characteristics of Chinese college students’ English explicit grammatical knowledge and implicit grammatical knowledge?2) Which is a better promoter for Chinese college students’ English writing, explicit grammatical knowledge teaching or implicit grammatical knowledge teaching?The participants in this study are composed of 60 first-year non-English major students from two intact classes in Hefei Normal College. The instruments used in this study consists of a questionnaire, two writing tests (pre-test and post-test), a grammatical test and an interview. Both groups have two English writing lessons once a week when the experiment will last for 1.5 months of 6 educational weeks. There are 12 lessons from March to April,2015. The who le experiment is divided into three stages: pre-test is the first in which a questionnaire, initial English writing and test of implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge are used to understand students’level and lay the foundation of future teaching; teaching is the second step in which implicit grammatical teaching will be conducted to the experimental group while traditional explicit grammatical teaching will be conducted to the controlling group separately; post-test and interview as the third step will be conducted after 6 weeks in which similar grammar and composition test are tested on both groups. In the last, analyze the data and draw out the scientific proof upon the research questions. Although there may exist some limitations in the present study, the findings have meaningful pedagogical implications for college English writing teaching in China.The experiment shows that Chinese non-English major college students have a better command of English explicit grammatical knowledge than the implicit grammatical knowledge; In English writing proficiency, implicit teaching is more effective than explicit teaching. There are other two findings in this study:most of the participants prefer explicit teaching and want to change explicit teaching method into implicit teaching method; implicit grammatical knowledge and explicit grammatical knowledge are both positive to the English writing proficiency.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1 is a general introduction. Chapter 2 reviews related theories and researches. Chapter 3 presents the research methodology. Results and discussion of the study and the conclusions of the thesis are respectively brought forth in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.