An Empirical Study On Explicit And Implicit Learning Of English Vocabulary And Double Negatives

Explicit and implicit learning have long been researched by scholars of second language acquisition. The early studies mostly divide the two areas, emphasizing the difference between explicit and implicit learning. However, with further exploration, many researchers start to search for the advantage of each one or join the two together. It has been realized that explicit and implicit learning both have influence on acquisition process, although in different aspects, and the two possess a close relationship of mutual reliance, mutual transformation and mutual complement.This research is devoted to study the differences between implicit and explicit learning on vocabulary and grammatical structures. Two groups of students are involved. Then the experiment is divided into three parts:a pre-test, the treatment, and a post-test. The purpose of the pre-test is to test whether the target vocabulary and structure used in the experiment have already been known to the participants. The treatment is divided into two sections:classroom teaching and a following test. In the classroom teaching, students of group one were exposed to an explicit teaching methodology through elaboration on target vocabulary and student of group two were exposed to an explicit teaching methodology through illustration on target double negative structures. Meanwhile, students of group one were exposed to an implicit teaching methodology through a reading passage provided in the following test on target double negative structures and student of group two were exposed to an implicit teaching methodology through the same reading passage on target vocabulary. The following test also provides a sentence translation to observe their learning of English vocabulary and double negatives through both explicit strategy and implicit strategy. The post-test uses sentence translation to ask both the two groups to translate twelve sentences in order to research the posterior effects of explicit learning and implicit learning of English vocabulary and double negatives. Finally, a comparison was made between explicit learning and implicit learning of English vocabulary and double negatives. The results show that vocabulary is easier for students to learn through both explicit and implicit strategies and it has a comparatively longer retention in memory. However, double negatives can be hardly learned through implicit learning and they have relatively short duration in memory.