A Study Of English Majors’ Grammatical Competence

Many comprehensive and significant researches have been made on explicit and implicit knowledge in SLA studies. However, studies on language learners’ grammatical competence from the aspect of explicit and implicit knowledge are scarce. With English majors of four grades in a Normal University in China as the study object, this thesis, from the perspective of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge, tries to make an investigation on the status, characteristics and developing trend of their grammatical competence under the cross-sectional method.The testing materials used in this study include a Timed Writing Test and a meta-linguistic knowledge test. All the data are analyzed by means of the statistical software SPSS17.0,using One-way analysis of variance to survey both explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of the students in terms of morphological structures and syntactic structures. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, there is a remarkable development on the grammatical competence of English majors from Grade One to Grade Two in both explicit and implicit aspects, but the differences among sophomores, juniors and seniors are not statistically significant.Secondly, in general, students’ implicit grammatical competence is much lower than their explicit grammatical competence among the four grades. In addition, the study confirms the previous findings that the difficulty of grammatical structure varies in accordance with whether the knowledge of such a structure is explicit or implicit. Some structures that students have mastered in terms of explicit grammatical knowledge may turn out to be difficult in terms of implicit knowledge and vice versa.Thirdly, it is shown that students have a better grasp of morphological structures than syntactic structures in terms of explicit grammatical competence. However, they perform better in syntactic structures than morphological structures, when it comes to implicit grammatical competence.It is hoped that these findings of the present study can facilitate a better understanding of some problems on grammar learning in Chinese EFL learners and shed light on the teaching of English grammar.