An Exploration Of The Impact Of Language Aptitude And Explicitness Of Language Teaching Upon Chinese Junior High School Students' Learning Of English Complex And Simple Structures

In the field of second language acquisition,the researchers have been paying their more interests in research of grammar teaching.Language complexity has been still an issue,and the discussion has centered this question: what makes learning second language grammatical structures become complex?The factors appear to be multifaceted,stemming not only from language aptitude in cognitive ability but also from instructional explicitness and language complexity.So far,although many studies have investigated how these factors interact in determining L2 learning language complexity,there was still no consensus between these studies.The current study aims at investigating the impact of language aptitude and explicitness of language teaching upon Chinese junior high school students' learning of English complex and simple structures.Therefore,the research questions to be explored in the present study are as follows:1.What effect does language aptitude have on the learning of English complex and simple structures for junior high school students?2.What effect does instructional explicitness have on the learning of English complex and simple structures for junior high school students?Sixty students in two intact classes participated in this study at Meichuan Middle School.According to the experiment design,participants were divided into two groups respectively.Class 1 was considered as the explicit instruction group and Class 2 was the implicit instruction group.There were30 participants in two classes respectively.LLAMA A test was used to test learners' language aptitude.Language outcomes were measured by means of grammatical judgment tasks that measured learners' explicit knowledge and oral production tasks that measured learners' implicit knowledge.Passive voice and past progressive as the two grammatical structures were considered to differ in terms of their complexity according the criteria proposed by Hulstijn and de Graaff(1994).The design included three phases: a pretest,an instructional treatment phase and a post-test.There were seven weeks during the experiment.In the first week,learners were asked to pretest before the target structures were taught.Within the first week,participants completed the language aptitude test in a laboratory.After the pretest,there were instructional treatment and post-test.From the second to fifth week,the instruction treatment was conducted.In the second and third week,the past progressive was the first structure to be taught.In the fourth week,participants were given post-test GJT and OPT of the past progressive.In the fifth and sixth week,the passive voice was taught in explicit and implicit groups respectively.The passive post-test was conducted on the Monday of the seventh week.This paper used the SPSS 24 to analyze data.The results of the research are as follows:1)Language aptitude components,especially inductive language learning ability,played a significant role in the learning of English grammar structures.Inductive language learning ability of learners had a significant effect on the learning of complex structure(passive voice).2)Explicit and implicit instructions all played a significant role in learning English complex and simple structures.The results revealed that explicit instruction was more effective for complex structure(passive voice)than implicit instruction,and explicit and implicit instruction had no significant difference on learning simple structure(past progressive)for learners.The results of two research questions showed that learner's language aptitude and explicit instruction had the significant effects upon the learning of complex structure.When learners are introduced to a new and relatively complex structure,aptitude is a cognitive ability that may help them to learn the target structure in less time and in more depth.If the majority of learners in the language classroom lack strong aptitude skills,language teachers should provide more explicit information about language or modify their instructional approach in other ways according to target structures.Matching learners' strengths with explicit and implicit instruction could boost learner language development.