An Experimental Study On The Grammar Instruction From The Perspective Of Implicit And Explicit Learning Theory

With the development of English instruction, and also with the rising attention on vocational education in China, the effectiveness of English teaching in vocational college has became the center of discussion. And among the discussion, whether explicit instruction or implicit instruction is able to improve students’ leaning ability is a question that needs to be solved.So far, the relevant researchers are centered on the English instruction in middle school and university, the studies that investigating the effectiveness of English teaching in vocational college are relatively few. Therefore, the present study is focused on the English grammatical instruction in vocational college, through making a comparison between explicit instruction and implicit instruction on the acquisition of attributive clause, aims at finding out which instructional approach is more helpful for target students to acquire and keep grammatical knowledge.The subjects of the present study consisted of 60 first year students from Baotou vocational & technical school. They were divided into two groups,namely explicit instruction group and implicit instruction group. Before the instruction was going to be applied, the subjects received a proficiency test to make sure that they were at the same level of language awareness of English attributive clause. According to the result, there was no significant difference between the two groups. Then the explicit group received explicit instruction,while the implicit group was exposed to implicit instruction. The instruction lasted for two weeks, which included four 45-minute regular classes per week.In explicit group, the detailed grammatical rules were introduced by the teacher, which was totally avoided in implicit group. The students in implicit group were asked to figure out the meaning and construction of target grammar point all by themselves. The materials contained in the study included reading materials and related questions. There were three instruments involved in the study, a pretest and two posttests. The pretest aimed at investigating whether the two experimental groups shared the same level of language awareness of English attributive clause. The posttest which was conducted to testify the effectiveness of two instructional approaches was given one week after the instructions were finished. The delayed posttest,which was conducted at week 8, was intended for comparisons the effectiveness of two approaches in keeping the knowledge in the long term.All the data were collected and analyzed by SPSS software. The results showed that explicit instruction worked better than implicit instruction not only in the acquisition of target structure, but also in the long-term knowledge keeping. The present study was conducted in the hope of finding some implications for nowadays grammar teaching in vocational college.