Exploring Explicit Instruction And Implicit Instruction's Influences On Comprehension And Production

For at least the past two decades, the study of explicit instruction and implicit instruction has occupied a central place in second language acquisition (SLA) studies, although its precise role in SLA has been a matter of debate. This research based on Schmidt's (1990) Noticing Hypothesis and Pienemann's (1998) Teachability Hypothesis has been prompted by the shortcoming of previous studies which only focus on the target structures'comprehension.Compared with the research on the role of explicit instruction and implicit instruction on SLA in EFL contexts, relatively few researches have been conducted in EFL contexts. Therefore this thesis is an attempt to examine the effects on comprehension and production of explicit L2 grammar instruction and implicit L2 grammar instruction in the context of China where English is taught as a foreign language.The subjects involved in the present study were 60 first-year Chinese school-age learners of non-English major residing in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. They were divided into an explicit group and an implicit group. The target structure, the finite relative clause led by relative pronouns, was embedded in the reading task.Learning effects on comprehension and production were measured by means of a multiple-choice test and a sentence combination test administered after the treatment. An independent-samples t-test was performed to compare the learning effects of the two groups on comprehension and production. Results indicate that explicit instruction facilitates the English learning better compared with the effects of implicit instruction both on comprehension and production. What's more, the effects of production can last a long time (at least one month) both in explicit group and implicit group. The study provides useful insights into our comprehension of explicit instruction which are of pedagogical significance to EFL instruction.