Research On Implicit And Explicit Instruction In Senior High School English Classes

English grammar is an indispensible part of English teaching in senior high school. Hot issues on if teach grammar, how to teach grammar and how to dispose of the relationship between communicative competence and language accuracy have always been disputed heatedly in the field of English teaching. When it comes to grammar teaching, explicit and implicit instructions are two influential teaching approaches. The two opposite theories on implicit and explicit learning proposed by Krashen and Schmidt have laid the foundation for the two modes of instruction in second language acquisition.Currently the teaching approach i.e."presentation, practice, production"is still prevalent in China's senior high school. Researches show that such 3Ps instruction is not effective in students'mastery and flexible use of grammatical rules. In view of such teaching situation, the present study centers on the following three research questions: (1) How does explicit instruction facilitate the learning of attributive clause for Chinese senior high school students? (2) How does implicit instruction facilitate the learning of attributive clause for Chinese senior high school students? (3) Is there a synergistic effect between the two instructions? If there is, which order of combination is better: the combination of explicit-implicit instruction or the combination of implicit-explicit instruction? It intends to explore the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on grammar teaching in senior high school.Subjects involved are 120 first-year students at Ning'an senior high school in Heilongjiang Province. They are divided into 4 groups: explicit group, implicit group, explicit-implicit group and implicit-explicit group. Prior to the experiments, a proficiency test is conducted. The test scores show that subjects are almost at the same learning level in English. In the experiments, subjects of the four groups learn the target grammatical structure------attributive clause in different teaching approaches accordingly. After the experiments, subjects are given an immediate test. Two months later, the delayed test is designed for subjects. The two tests aim to detect the subjects'mastery and retention of the target grammatical structure.The collected data is processed and analyzed by the statistics software SPSS16.0. The experimental results manifest that synergistic effect between explicit and implicit instruction does exist, and the combination order of the two modes of teaching approaches influences the teaching effect indeed. As far as the teaching of attributive clause is concerned, explicit-implicit instruction is more appropriate. Conclusions from present study provide implications for learners and instructors in senior high school. They are of profound significance for the efficiency of English teaching and learning.