An Empirical Study On The Developmental Differences Between Chinese EFL Learners’ Implicit And Explicit Grammatical Knowledge

The dichotomy of implicit-explicit knowledge was brought into the field of SLA from the cognitive science and has thus become one of the main topics in SLA researches. It has now been agreed upon by most linguists that the ultimate goal of SLA is to establish an implicit language knowledge system that exists outside the learners’ consciousness. However, explicit linguistic knowledge also plays a significant role during the process of SLA. Previous theoretical and empirical researches have made attempts to develop means for separate elicitation of learners’ implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge.The current study, based on the research findings of the previous researches, using two proficiency-groups of Chinese EFL learners as the subjects, investigated the difference between their implicit and explicit knowledge on some basic grammatical functors. Two task forms, namely timed essay writing task and untimed grammaticality judgment test (GJT), were used to elicit learners’implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge, respectively.Results showed that there did exist a gap between the learners’development of implicit grammatical knowledge and that of explicit knowledge, with the latter surpassing the former. There were a lot of cases where learners corrected in the follow-up GJT the very or similar mistakes they themselves committed while writing the essays, or where learners managed to correct most items under a certain grammatical category in the GJT though making a few themselves in the essay writing task. Besides, it was also found that high-proficiency learners were more developed than low-proficiency learners in both implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge, and the gap between the two proficiency groups was wider in terms of explicit knowledge.