Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Grammatical Knowledge On Senior High School Students’ English Reading Ability

Explicit and implicit learning has become one of the heated topics in SLA. Asthe products of these two learning processes, explicit and implicit grammaticalknowledge have also attracted researchers’ attention. However, there is limitedresearch on the predictions of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge for seniorhigh school students’ English reading ability home and abroad. The present studyaims to explore the general picture of senior high school students’ explicit andimplicit grammatical knowledge as well as the better predictor of these two types ofgrammatical knowledge for students’ English reading ability with vocabulary as thecontrol variable.120senior high school students in Grade2from Leizhou No.1Middle Schoolin Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province took part in this study. A vocabulary levels testwas firstly used to examine students’ English vocabulary as the control variable. Atimed grammaticality judgment test was then employed to test their implicitgrammatical knowledge while an untimed grammaticality judgment test and ametalinguistic knowledge test were adopted to measure their explicit grammaticalknowledge. As for the tests for English reading ability, a timed readingcomprehension test and an untimed reading comprehension test were applied toinvestigate the respective functions of these two types of grammatical knowledge onsenior high school students’English reading ability in tests of different conditions.By means of Descriptive Statistical Analyses, Pearson Production-momentAnalyses and Hierarchical Regression Analyses in SPSS, the major findings weresummarized as follows: first, senior high school students’ mastery of explicitgrammatical knowledge was better than that of the implicit one; second, in the timedreading comprehension test, implicit grammatical knowledge appeared to be a betterpredictor while in the untimed reading comprehension test, both explicit and implicitgrammatical knowledge had predictions for senior high school students’ English reading ability.The above findings suggest that since students’ mastery of explicitgrammatical knowledge was better than that of the implicit one, when teachersattach importance to the teaching of explicit grammatical knowledge, more attentionshould be given to the input of implicit grammatical knowledge or the conversionfrom explicit grammatical knowledge to the implicit one so that students’ Englishreading ability would be improved.