A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Vocabulary Teaching To Adult English Learners And Teaching Implications

English plays an extraordinary important role in the international communication, and with the worldwide use of English, more and more adults have become members of English learning. So both researchers and learners have done too much to probe a better way to learn English. It is no doubt that effective vocabulary learning is crucial to language study. On vocabulary teaching, there exist two representative instructions: explicit vocabulary instruction and implicit vocabulary instruction. However, most of past studies often chose middle school students or college students as participants. After searching on the internet, the writer found there were no masters'papers referred to adult learners'vocabulary learning or teaching in China. Because adults have different characteristics, knowledge background, learning motivation from regular college students, it's necessary to pay much attention to adult English learners. Therefore, the study tried to probe which one was more effective to adult English learners between explicit vocabulary instruction and implicit vocabulary instruction.Based on three related theories: depth-of-processing hypothesis (DOPH), Krashen's input hypothesis model of L2 learning and acquisition-learning hypothesis, the writer designed the study cautiously which lasted two months. Participants were freshmen from the College of Continuing Education, Northwest Normal University in China. They enrolled in 2009, majoring in English education. These students were assigned to two paralleled classes according to their scores of Entrance Examination for Institute. Class1 was composed of 52students defined as the explicit group, while Class2 had 50 students defined as the implicit group. The instruments of this study were pretest, posttests and questionnaires. After collecting the data, all of them were analyzed by SPSS13.0, and it could be concluded: 1. the explicit vocabulary instruction is superior to the implicit vocabulary instruction in the number and the depth of the new words to adult learners with the help of data analysis and discussion. 2. Adult learners prefer integrating the two instructions to using them solely after analysis of questionnaires. At last, the writer hopes the study would help teaching practice to adult English learners and bridge the gap between university education and continuing education in English vocabulary teaching, although there are still some limitations about it. Some suggestions for the further research are offered in the end of the study.