On Junior Chinese English Learners'acquisition Of Implicit Knowledge Of Inflectional Morphemes

Inflectional morphemes have been problems for Chinese English learners in their spontaneously oral production, even for the advanced learners. Most of English learners perform well in their grammar tests, but not in their oral production. It indicates that they have a good command of explicit knowledge of inflectional morphemes rather than implicit knowledge.Verb mistakes are the most common ones students make in their oral production.The present study targets simple past tense, employing explicit instruction and implicit instruction to investigate implicit knowledge of inflectional morphemes,especially the effect on acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms. 64 participants from two classes in a junior high school took part in the study and they were divided into explicit group and implicit group casually. Pre-test was conducted one day before the instruction to ensure the equivalence of proficiency levels of two groups. Pre-test and delayed-test were conducted respectively the second day and the4 th week after the instruction. Explicit instruction and implicit instruction were delivered respectively on the explicit group and implicit group by the same English teacher. The instruction lasted for 300 minutes in total in six days. Data was collected and analyzed through SPSS 17.0.Three major questions were put forward in this study: 1) what are the effects of explicit instruction on junior English learners' acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms? 2) What are the effects of implicit instruction on the acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms? 3) Which type of instruction benefits the acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms more?The results of the study showed that there was positive effect of both explicit instruction and implicit instruction on the acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms, but the effect was not significant; the implicit knowledge even degenerated over time, but in the delayed-test, the acquisition of implicit knowledge in implicit group was significantly superior over that in explicit group, which may prove that implicit instruction is more effective for the acquisition of implicit knowledge of simple past forms.Comparing with the explicit group, implicit group had a higher input frequency of simple past forms, and it might be the frequency effect that led to superiority of implicit group over the explicit group on acquisition of implicit knowledge. Therefore,Chinese English learners process simple past forms largely relying on declarative memory system, and input frequency is an important factor that affects the acquisition of the implicit knowledge. Besides, though there was no significant difference between implicit group and explicit group in the post-test, the performance of implicit group in the delayed-test indicates that implicit instruction has a longer effect on the acquisition of simple past forms.This study has practical meaning for the teaching of simple past forms, and further provide guidance for developing a new approach to the acquisition of implicit knowledge of inflectional morphemes. It provides a more effective pedagogical method for English teachers which suggests implicit instruction should be employed during classroom teaching.