A Study Of Explicit L2 Knowledge Use In Chinese Students' EFL Learning

At present, the importance of grammar and instruction of explicit rules has continued to be de-emphasized in foreign language classrooms. Many researchers insisted that conscious learning of grammar forms cannot be transformed into automatic linguistic competence, and learners could only learn declarative knowledge from formal rules instruction. However, most of the theoretical findings and corresponding methodologies in the field of SLA and FLT failed to work as had been expected. As a result, recent studies in SLA stimulate researchers to reconsider the function of explicit knowledge in EFL and FLT.There have been relatively few studies that have had focused exclusively on L2 learners' explicit knowledge, whereas there have been many more studies that may have addressed this aspect in the context of studying SLA. The present study aims to investigate the correlation between the strategic use of explicit L2 knowledge and Chinese students' language proficiency in EFL learning, and seeks to provide more teaching approaches and strategies to L2 classroom. In order to understand better how the teacher may help students achieve a desirable level of proficiency in the academic environment, the following issues are addressed. (1) What is the relationship between strategic use of explicit L2 knowledge and achievement of high proficiency in EFL learning? (2) How the validity of learners' explicit L2 knowledge contribute to their task performance? (3) What types of explicit L2 rules are easy and hard for learners? (4) Whether explicit knowledge can promote learners' interlanguage development independently or not? An experiment is carried out to check how, and to what extent explicit linguistic knowledge contribute to Chinese students' EFL learning. The 16 subjects are non-English-major students from Jilin University. They asked to finish a grammaticality judgment test, by use of self-observation and self-report. The results of the study show that the higher the subjects are in terms of English proficiency, the more they tend to draw on explicit rules and perform better on the given task. The subjects also differ in the validity of explicit rule explanations. And they tend to perform better in editing morphological errors than non-morphological ones. The results also indicate the codependency between explicit and implicit L2 knowledge in the process of EFL. The results give some implications to FLT. It proposes some tentative suggestions for language teachers as how to make use of explicit grammar to improve their teaching and guide students to achieve a desirable proficiency in English.Admittedly, the study contains certain limitations, the author hopes to study the use of explicit L2 knowledge from multidimensional viewpoints in the future research.