Explicit And Implicit Method In Teaching English Request Strategies To Students In Vocational Colleges

As an important aspect of pragmatic learning,request strategies have drawn much attention for a long time.Researchers abroad have proved the necessity of request strategies teaching and have explored the effects of different instructions on it.Domestic researchers focused on status survey but less on the effects of different instructions on it,especially in vocational colleges.Based on Schmidt's(1993)noticing hypothesis,Bialystok's(1993)two-dimensional model and competence-based education,this thesis does an experiment to answer the following two questions:(1)Do explicit instruction and implicit instruction have different influence on vocational college students' appropriate use of request strategies?(2)Do explicit instruction and implicit instruction have different influence on vocational college students' attitude towards request strategies teaching?Seventy-eight sophomore vocational college students from two parallel classes were randomly selected and assigned to explicit group and implicit group.The whole experiment lasts for 12 weeks and its teaching content is how the three situational factors affecting students' choice of request strategies.The explicit group received explicit metapragmatic rules and practiced them through direct consciousness-raising task,and then received metapragmatic feedback.Meanwhile,the implicit group was provided with a combination of implicit techniques comprising typographical enhancement and indirect consciousness-raising task,then provided with implicit feedback without metapragmatic information.The experiment collected data through a test paper and a questionnaire.Then carried out independent-sample T test,paired-sample T test and percentage about these data with SPSS 22.0.Results from the study indicate that:(1)Explicit instruction and implicit instruction do have different influence on vocational college students' appropriate use of request strategies.Although all subjects' using of request strategies have been improved,the effect of explicit instruction(t=-6.034,p=.000<.05)is more obvious than implicit instruction(t=-1.765,p=.086>.05);(2)Explicit instruction and implicit instruction do have different influence in vocational college students' attitude towards request strategies teaching.The explicit group has more positive attitude towards request strategies teaching than the implicit group.Based on the above findings,the author suggests that researchers should try to combine the explicit instruction and the implicit instruction in further study.