A Contrastive Analysis On The Effectiveness Of Implicit And Explicit Instruction

With the development of SLA(second language acquisition) research and the reform of English teaching, the central issue of grammar teaching is no longer whether it should be implicitly taught or explicitly taught but how to teach it. In other words, when students learn grammar, they are instructed implicit or explicitly. In the field of SLA, many scholars and researchers have made significant contribution to the stu dy of implicit and explicit learning. However, most research on the role of implicit instruction and explicit instruction were conducted in ESL contexts and relatively few studies have been conducted in EFL contexts. Additionally, existing studies mainly selected senior high school students or college students as subjects.This study is anchored on two rival claims: one by Krashen, and the other by Schmidt, who argued over the role of conscious in SLA. The current study attempts to examine the effects of implicit instruction and explicit instruction on children’s learning of the English comparative adjectives, in the context of China where English is taught as a foreign language. This thesis centers on the following research questions: what effects do impli cit and explicit instruction have on the learning of English adjective comparatives? And which one is more effective?Subjects involved in this experiment were 30 sixth-grade students who were attending a training school in Xiangtan. They were divided into two groups: the implicit group and the explicit group, with 15 students in each group. Prior to the experiment, a pretest was carried out so as to test if the subjects of the two groups were at the same English proficiency level. In the treatment sessions, the groups received different types of instruction. The implicit group were simply exposed to the meaning of the teaching materials, while the explicit group received direct rule explanation of the target grammar. After the experiment, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were administered to check the immediate and long-term effects of the two modes of instruction.SPSS 16.0 was employed to process and analyze the relevant data collected from the experiment. Independent Sample T-test and One-way ANOVA were the two main data analysis methods which were used for the three tests.The results of the experiment showed that: 1) there was a significant difference between the implicit group and the explicit group regarding the learning of English adjective comparatives. Explicit group performed better than implicit group for it could better draw students’ attention to the target grammar and even help them pick it up more quickly and more efficiently. 2) As for the delayed post-test administered three weeks later, there was still a difference between the two groups irrespective of the decline of both groups’ performance, revealing that the long-term effect of explicit instruction was more durable than that of implicit instruction. 3) During the teaching experiment, subjects in the implicit group were more active and more motivated compared to those in the explicit group. Therefore, implicit instruction was more conducive to arouse students’ motivation and interest in English grammar learning to a certain extent.Meanwhile, this study carries some implications for English teaching and learning for young learners. To implement the New Curriculum Reform, English teachers should appropriately handle the relationship between implicit instruction and explicit instruction, and select appropriate teaching materials for students at different levels in order to facilitate their efficient learning.