An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Explicit Knowledge And Implicit Knowledge In Chinese Second Language Acquisition Learners

The concept of implicit and explicit knowledge was brought into the field of Second Language Acquisition from the field of Cognitive Science.Explicit knowledge refers to language which can be taught word by word and learned consciously by students(Ellis,2004),while implicit knowledgerefers to language which is occasionally acquired,implicitly stored and automatically retrieved.Researchers from the field of SLA have conducted researches from various perspectives,including the relationship between them,teaching methodologies and their contributions to English proficiency.Although there have been achievements of implicit/explicit knowledge's influence on learners' second language development,many still argue about the constructs and measurement of them.The “interface theory” discusses three views about the transformation between them—non-interface position,strong interface position and weak interface position.And even in empirical studies,most of the subjects in the tests were English major students whose English levels were obviously beyond the designed research,which lowers the validity and reliability.This test chose 55 secondary and high school students in an English training center as the subjects.The Oral Imitation Test and Metalinguistic Knowledge Test wereused to measure implicit and explicit knowledge.We have found a high degree of correspondence in the two tests by comparing the accurate items in both tests.Subjects generally scored high accuracy in both tests,which could serve as proof that explicit knowledge transformed into implicit knowledge.This study also figures out the transformation ratio of 17 specific grammar structures.It turned out that some early acquired structures' transformation ratioswere high,like third-person-s,simple past tense and comparatives,while other late acquired and complicated structures' ratioswere relatively low,like unreal conditionals,relative clauses and ergative verbs.The author hopes to offer some inspiration and suggestions for future studies.