Empirical Study On Incidental Grammatical Learning Of Chinese English Learners

For the past two decades since incidental learning was first introduced to China in the 1990s, the study of the learning effect of incidental exposure condition compared with explicit instruction condition has always been a hot topic. However, previous research has mainly focused on incidental learning of vocabulary; a few studies abroad have extended the research to test whether language learners can also acquire the word order rule underlying the linguistic forms they are exposed to without any instruction to search for or learn the rule. Nevertheless, generally speaking, studies on incidental learning of grammatical features or rules are still quite few. This study investigated whether Chinese learners of English can acquire the case marking rules of Japanese under the incidental exposure condition as well as the learning effectiveness of incidental exposure condition compared with explicit instruction condition.Sixty third-year English majors from Chinese universities participated in this study. The subjects were divided into two groups with thirty students in each group. The two groups were trained under explicit instruction and incidental exposure conditions respectively, and then the immediate GJT, and the two delayed GJTs were administrated. The results indicated that not only can Chinese learners of English acquire the case marking rule of Japanese under incidental exposure condition, but the learning effect is durable. The results further showed that compared with explicit learning, incidental learning is more durable. The study provides useful insights into grammar learning, which is also of pedagogical significance to EFL instruction.