A Study Of English Grammatical Competence Of Students From Senior Middle School

Linguistic field has done many comprehensive and fruitful researches on explicit and implicit language knowledge in second language acquisition process, but the studies on high school student’s language ability are not many from the level of explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge, and the study on high school students’grammar ability is less. This thesis takes senior students from an experimental middle school as the research object, and uses the lateral approach in the developing study to explore the present situation, characteristics and the developing law of senior students’English grammar ability from a perspective of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge. It is hopeful that the results of the study can give some enlightenment for improving high school students’English grammar ability and the overall English level, and provide some suggestions for high school English grammar teaching and learning.The test tool this research adopts is a timed writing test and a meta-language ability test. The statistical software SPSS17.0is adopted and its single factor analysis of variance is used to deal with all the data. This research explores the degree of three-grade high school students’ mastering explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge from the perspective of morphology and syntax. Through the analysis of the data, the research has found the following results:Firstly, high school students’explicit and implicit grammar abilities are increasingly rising from Grade One to Grade Three, among which the differences of both explicit and implicit grammar abilities are not obvious in the phase of Grade One; the explicit grammar knowledge ability in the stage of Grade Two is prominent; the implicit grammar knowledge ability in the stage of Grade Three is a bit stronger.Secondly, generally speaking, whether junior or senior, high school students’implicit grammatical ability is significantly lower than the explicit grammar ability. In addition, this study has also confirmed the previous study result that the difficulty of the grammatical structure differs in that they are presented in explicit or implicit form and some explicit grammatical structures may not be transferred into implicit grammar ability by implicit acquisition, and vice versa.Thirdly, in terms of explicit grammar ability, the level of high school three-grade students’mastering the morphological grammar structure is better than that of syntactic grammar structure. However, in terms of implicit grammar ability, the level of high school three-grade students’ mastering the morphological grammar structure is weaker than that of syntactic grammar structure.To some extent, the results from this research can help people better find some of Chinese learners’problems in English grammar learning. At the same time, it can also provide some reference for the future high school English teaching.