A Correlative Study Of Explicit/Implicit Linguistic Knowledge And English Proficiency Of Senior High Students

Since the concepts of second language explicit learning and implicit learning were distinguished,researchers at home and abroad have carried out a large number of experiments on the relationship between the explicit/implicit linguistic knowledge and second language proficiency which show different results.However,under the background of teaching English as a foreign language in China,the empirical researches on this issue by researchers are relatively limited.In response to this situation,this study takes 191 students from a senior high school as the research participants.The test papers,questionnaire and interview are used as research methods to research the following questions: 1)What is the current situation of senior high students' English explicit linguistic knowledge and English implicit linguistic knowledge? 2)What is the current situation of senior high students' English proficiency? 3)What is the correlation between senior high students' general English explicit/implicit linguistic knowledge and their general English proficiency? Through the analysis and discussion of related data and interviews,the conclusions are drawn as follows: 1)The test scores show that learners' English explicit linguistic knowledge surpasses their English implicit linguistic knowledge which means that the participants in this study fail to internalize the English grammatical structure of explicit linguistic knowledge they have gained,which can be considered as the evidence for the weak-interface position to some extent.2)There is a moderate positive correlation between participants' English explicit linguistic knowledge/ English implicit linguistic knowledge and English proficiency;When it comes to the relationship between learners' English explicit/implicit linguistic knowledge and the specific parts of the English proficiency scores,significant positive correlation is reached between listening/reading/comprehensive English/writing performance and explicit/implicit linguistic knowledge respectively in which the strongest correlation occurs between English explicit linguistic knowledge and comprehensive English/ writing;In the high-level group,participants' English implicit linguistic knowledge contributes more to their English proficiency,whereas those in the low-level group are more dependent on English explicit linguistic knowledge to complete the English proficiency test.The following suggestions are put forward for English teaching in accordance with the results of the study: 1)both teachers and students should pay more attention to the gaining of implicit linguistic knowledge;2)Both explicit learning and explicit teaching are still needed in the second language teaching and learning under the background of non-target language.