An Empirical Study Of Implicit And Explicit Learning In EFL

Studies of cognitive psychology show that except explicit learning, human beings can also use implicit learning to finish complex learning tasks. The study of implicit and explicit learning is a critical part in the field of cognitive psychology and is recently being conducted in the field of psycholinguistics, applied linguistics and second language acquisition.As the study of the physiological mechanisms and cognitive bases of implicit and explicit learning deepens, many researchers no longer emphasize the difference between the two learning modes. They seek the advantage of each learning mode and combine them organically, because they realize that both learning modes play an important role in different aspects of learning process. The interrelations between implicit and explicit learning are called"synergistic effect". Chinese researcher Yang Zhiliang (1998) and his colleagues propose a biconical model of implicit and explicit learning, in which the relationship between the two learning modes is described vividly.The present study adopts the popular psychological skill abroad—the strong dissociation procedure to do the experiment with Chinese adult English beginners in a university as subjects in order to find out the effect of implicit and explicit learning of English phonological and syntactic knowledge and a synergistic effect between implicit and explicit learning on the learners'performance.The results of the experiment on the phonological knowledge learning show that implicit learning has the advantageous effect in the learning of English phonological knowledge. The synergistic effect plays an important role, because the subjects in the combination group perform best. There is no significant difference between the performance of implicit-explicit learning and that of explicit-implicit learning.The results of the experiment on the syntactic knowledge learning show that explicit learning has the advantageous effect in the simple task, while implicit learning has the advantageous effect in the complex tasks. There also exists a synergistic effect, because the subjects in the combination group perform best. The performance of implicit-explicit learning and that of explicit-implicit learning do not have significant difference in the simple task, while the performance of explicit-implicit learning is better than that of implicit-explicit learning in the learning of the most complicated task. The combination order has an influence on the subjects'performance in some complicated tasks.The conclusions from the experiments have some implications for foreign language learning and teaching. To put the"synergistic effect"into the foreign language teaching activities will help learners cultivate language awareness, activate grammar teaching and improve the efficiency of learning and teaching. We should pay special attention to and make full use of the learners'implicit cognitive activities as possible as we can and hold the view of dynamic weight of implicit and explicit learning in foreign language learning and teaching.