Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On Junior Middle School Students' Acquisition Of Passive Voice

With the development of research on second language acquisition and reform of English grammar teaching,explicit instruction and implicit instruction have gradually become a hot topic,but most existing research focused on vocabulary teaching.This study chose English passive voice as the target structure and aimed to explore the following three research questions:(1)What are the differential effects of explicit instruction and implicit instruction on the acquisition of the passive voice by EFL learners of different proficiency levels?(2)What is the overall effect of explicit-implicit instruction on the acquisition of the passive voice by EFL learners?(3)What are the differential effects of explicit-implicit instruction on the acquisition of the passive voice by EFL learners of different proficiency levels?Students from three classes in a middle school in a northwestern province were recruited as the participants of this study.They were randomly named as the implicit group,the explicit group and the implicit-explicit group and respectively received 90minutes' of implicit instruction,explicit instruction and implicit-explicit instruction.After the instructional treatment,an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest were administered to the three groups to test the short-term and long-term effects of the three different teaching methods.Test results revealed that:(1)The explicit group,regardless of proficiency levels,had a better performance on the acquisition of the passive voice in both the immediate and the delayed post-tests than implicit group.(2)Compared with single implicit instruction or explicit instruction,the integration of explicit and implicit instruction is more effective for English learners to acquire the passive voice.(3)For both high-level and low-level students,the integrated explicit-implicit group had the best performance in the both immediate and delayed post-tests.To a certain extent,this study enriches research on explicit,implicit and explicit-implicit instruction in English grammar acquisition and provides some enlightenment for junior middle school teachers to teach the passive voice.