Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On The Acquisition Of Plural Marking By Senior High School Students: An Empiricalstudy

There have been growing and wide concerns about plural marking in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics. However, the traditional view regards plural marking as a simple language phenomenon. That’s why a great number of high school teachers pay little attention to it. What’s more, there are few studies on plural marking. Meanwhile, in the field of foreign language teaching, the issue of “whether grammar should be learned consciously or acquired unconsciously” has always been heatedly discussed and debated among scholars and researchers. This controversy led to distinctive teaching methods in foreign language teaching activities, namely explicit instruction and implicit instruction. To explore these two issues, an experimental study is carried out to probe into EFL learners’ acquisition of plural marking. This allows us to study and compare the effects of explicit and implicit instructions.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis and Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis, the study intends to analyze the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on high school students’ acquisition of plural marking. Two research questions are addressed:(1) Of the two methods of instruction- explicit instruction and implicit instruction- which is more effective on the acquisition of plural marking?(2) Is the integration of explicit and implicit instruction conducive to improving high school students’ acquisition of plural marking? If so, to what extent?153 Grade Two students of three intact classes were selected at random from a senior high school in Hunan province, who were then assigned at random to one control group and two treatment groups for the five-week experiment. The whole experiment consists of a pilot study, a pretest, a treatment of three diverse methods of instruction, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test. The data were collected and analyzed, revealing the following major findings:(1) The group which received explicit instruction outperformed the group who receives implicit instruction in both immediate post-test and delayed post-test, indicating that both the short-term effect and long-term effect of explicit instruction far more outweigh those of implicit instruction.(2) Of the three types of instruction, the integrative instruction is comparatively more effective than the other two types of instruction as shown by both immediate post-test and delayed post-test results.The findings provide empirical proof for the instruction and acquisition of plural marking and also expand the field of application and research, revealing both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Yet the limited sample size may constrain its generalizability.