An Empirical Study Of Non-English Majors' Use Of Implicit Grammatical Knowledge In Their English Compositions

Although traditional grammar instruction has been renounced, grammatical knowledge is a critical part, which cannot be neglected. When implicit grammar instruction, which is gradually in line with the requirements of language teaching, steps onto the stage of foreign language teaching, it has re-aroused researchers'attention to linguistics.In the teaching process, the author has been noticing that there are a large number of inevitable mistakes in students'application of English. Thus, from the applied perspective of implicit grammatical knowledge, this research aims to probe the discrepancy in the application of subjects'implicit grammatical knowledge, together with the relationship between implicit grammatical knowledge level and their English proficiency, as well as reasons giving rise to the discrepancy.115 test takers of non-English majors from Jincheng College of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics have participated in a pilot study. As a result of this pilot study, 12 implicit grammatical structures are chosen as the main study basis in this empirical research. According to the English scores of College Entrance Examination, 63 students are picked out as ultimate research subjects, which are divided into two groups, that is, the High-score Group and the Low-score Group. In the experiment, English writing test and questionnaires are two ways to obtain the relevant research materials and data, and SPSS11.5 is used to analyze data.Experimental results show that there is statistical difference in the application of implicit grammatical knowledge between the two-level groups (Sig=0.00); moreover, subjects'implicit grammatical knowledge has a positive correlation with their English proficiency (r=0.913). In addition to the above results, this paper conducts a preliminary study to analyze and discuss the factors causing the differences between the two Groups in accordance with the questionnaire.The findings of the present study may promote a better understanding of the veiled problems of grammar application in Chinese EFL learners. Hopefully, the research helps to arouse both students'and teachers'awareness of the key role of implicit grammatical knowledge in L2 acquisition; teachers can also benefit a lot from language teaching in terms of implicit knowledge.