A Study On Integration Of Explicit And Implicit Grammar Instruction In Senior High Schools

As to grammar teaching, there exist two main representative approaches: explicit grammar instruction and implicit grammar instruction. Ellis says explicit instruction implies that the learners are given a rule which they then practice using, while implicit instruction refers that the learners are required to induce rules from examples given to them. In actual grammar teaching, both of these two instructions have their own advantages and disadvantages.In the explicit teaching process, grammatical rules can be well illustrated through teacher’s explanation, and students are able to have a clear idea of the language forms or sentence structures. But in this process, students may just focus on the target grammar and some related exercise. So in spite of their expert knowledge of grammar, students may perform poorly in communication. While in the implicit teaching process, students are given more opportunities to listen, read and speak and they are expected to find, conclude and learn grammatical rules themselves in these communicative activities. However, the implicit method puts too much stress on the role of students. Besides, for lack of systematic grammar knowledge, there are still many grammatical mistakes in students’output and they may fail to express themselves in proper and idiomatic English.Based on the analyses above, the author tries to combine explicit instruction with implicit instruction in actual teaching. So students can learn the grammar consciously; at the same time, they could internalize language structures when using them, and finally acquire the language. The present study, taking Krashen’s acquisition-learning hypothesis and Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis as its theoretical bases, attempts to test the effectiveness of integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction, by means of empirical study. An experimental study was carried out in ChongHua Senior High School. Two classes of Grade One were selected as the experimental class (EC), and the control class (CC) respectively. During the experiment, the EC was taught with the integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction, while the CC was taught implicitly. After the experiment, the data of the pre-test, post-test and the questionnaire were analyzed and the author drew a conclusion that compared with the implicit grammar instruction in communicative approach, the integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction can bring higher efficiency to senior high school students in their grammar learning.