The Effects Of Explicit/Implicit Instruction On Chinese EFL Learners' Idiom Learning

Idiom is an important and difficult part in college English vocabulary teaching and learning. Recently, cognitive psychologists, cognitive linguists and psychological linguists have made their researches on idiom learning and its cognitive processing. Some scholars have even begun to study EFL/ESL idiom acquisition. In China, however, studies on idioms largely focused on idiom comprehension or its syntactic features with an inadequate attention to second language idiom acquisition. On the other hand, explicit and implicit instructions, which were mostly applied to grammar teaching or writing tasks, have seldom been applied to vocabulary teaching and learning. In light of these two limitations, this thesis carried out an experimental study to probe into EFL learners'idiom learning in order to compare the effects of explicit and implicit instructions as well as to offer an experimental basis of idiom teaching and learning for language learners and language teachers.In light of input hypothesis and noticing hypothesis, the present study established a theoretical basis for explicit/implicit instruction as well as a set of concrete operational rules for both explicit and implicit classroom idiom teachings. In the study, fifteen idioms of three types were selected: Type 1-idioms with different linguistic forms and same conceptual bases in English and Chinese; Type 2-idioms with different linguistic forms and conceptual bases in both English and Chinese; and Type 3-idioms with same linguistic forms and different conceptual bases in both English and Chinese. The subjects are 61 freshmen from two parallel classes. They are non English majors and study at the same university in Fujian Province. In order to get a general view of target idiom learning of students in these two classes, the subjects firstly were asked to attend a pretest. Secondly, the two classes of subjects were taught the target idioms respectively in three weeks. Class 1 learned the target idioms under the condition of explicit instruction while Class 2 learned the target idioms under implicit instruction. Then an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest four weeks later were carried out to test their immediate and long-term effects of the target idiom learning. Finally all results obtained from pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest were displayed and analyzed. The results of pretest show that most subjects got little knowledge about the target idioms and there is no significant difference between the two classes. Then the results of immediate posttest and delayed posttest indicate that two instructions do have positive effects on target idiom learning. But explicit instruction has a better immediate effect on target idiom learning than implicit instruction for the possible reasons to better draw subjects'conscious awareness of target idioms and then result in a better conversion of comprehensible input to comprehended input. As for the long-term effect, although the results of the two instructions decline in delayed posttest, the long-term effect of explicit instruction appears to be significantly better than that of implicit instruction.Moreover, the present study further figures out that the effects of both explicit and implicit instructions vary with different idiom types. For target idioms Type 1 and Type 2 the effects of the two instructions have no significant difference while for Type 3 the effect of explicit instruction surpasses implicit instruction obviously.The present study also offers some implications for college English idiom teaching and learning. English teachers should not only choose appropriate teaching materials for students at different English proficiency levels, but also make good use of either explicit or implicit instruction to facilitate learners'idiom learning.Being an experimental research on idiom teaching and learning, the present study offers an experimental basis for improving college English idiom teaching and learning and also enlarges the application field of the two teaching dimensions, namely explicit and implicit instructions. It carries both practical and academic significances.