Middle School Students' Acquisition Of English Implicit Knowledge

The importance of students' acquisition of implicit knowledge has also been one of the most controversial issues in the field of foreign language learning.Despite a considerable number of studies on different methods of grammar instructions aiming to enhance students' implicit knowledge,very few have investigated students' current acquisition of implicit knowledge through naturalistic inquiry.Taking English articles(a,an,the,/)as a case,this study is an attempt to examine middle school students' acquisition of implicit knowledge of English grammar by answering specific questions: 1)How is middle school students' implicit knowledge of English articles reflected in their oral and writing tasks? And what mistakes do students make in oral and writing tasks? 2)What factors prevent students from acquiring implicit knowledge? 3)What should teachers do to enhance students' implicit knowledge? The participants of this study involve 114 middle school students and 3 English teachers.To measure students' implicit knowledge of English articles,3 measures,namely untimed grammar exercises,timed writing tasks and classroom oral production,were used.The number,proportion and type of wrong answers were administrated to examine the students' acquisition of implicit knowledge of English articles.Findings show that the majority of students perform well in grammar exercises,but in writing and speaking,they make various mistakes of articles,suggesting students' deficiency of implicit knowledge of English articles.Class observation and interview suggest that teachers' way of grammar teaching,lack of linguistic theories and overemphasis on examinations are the main factors that prevent students from acquiring implicit knowledge.Finally,the thesis suggests that language teaching should center on authentic and real-life oriented tasks rather than mechanical practice consciously designed with the aim of teaching grammar;the teacher should take the role of researcher to explore effective and vivid grammar teaching instructions so as to foster students' implicit knowledge;and the aim of grammar teaching is to enhance students' overall language ability instead of merely passing examinations.