The Role Of Implicit Instruction To Learning Of English Grammar Based On Output Activities

Whether it is necessary to teach English grammar has been a controversy for along time. However, there were still different kinds of methods for teaching grammar.And we can see the importance of grammar and grammar teaching. In1967, whenAmerican psychologist A.S. Reber in his "Artificial Grammar Implicit Learning"proposed the concept of implicit learning, the implicit learning and its opposite sideexplicit learning in second language learning started to be distinguished increasingly.There are many researches of adopting implicit instruction to teach English grammar.More and more people studied implicit instruction in the English environment asnative language, but in English as a foreign language environment research, therewere not so many. And there were much less domestic studies about implicitinstruction on the output and using of grammatical structures. A large number ofscholars hold different views for implicit instruction. Some claimed that secondlanguage development was mainly resulted from unconsciousness which excelledconsciousness. And some others regarded that the role of output was largely neglectedor negative. After Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis proposed, somescholars doubted that it should be added with an output hypothesis at least, whichbelieves the indispensable role of learners’ language output. To some extent, theoutput can promote second language acquisition, and to achieve the purpose ofcommunication and learners must make their output grammatical. And it is said thatconsciousness on the level of noticing has significant importance to language learning.Of course, a variety of viewpoints have their own advantages and disadvantages.Therefore, this article explores how to combine the two views to teach grammarwhich is important all the time. That is, allowing students to gain fluency incommunication through their independent implicit learning and meanwhile to achievethe accuracy in communication through some output activities which enables them tonotice the grammar rules and structures.This thesis discusses the different results of objective clause learning in order to solve the problem mentioned above. And it is based on the practical situation of juniorhigh school English grammar teaching and in accordance with Krashen, Schmidt,Swain and other related theories. The objective clause is taught in two differentmethods separately, that is, the implicit instruction based on output activities and3Ps(presentation, practice, product) teaching methods. This is used to explore whether theimplicit instruction based on output activities is better than pure explanations ofgrammar rules with boring drills of grammar structure. In the experimental study,46students in Grade Eight from an ordinary middle school in Liaocheng, Shandongprovince were chosen for this comparative study. They were divided into two groups,one was an experimental group and the other was a control group. The two groupswere carrying out the objective clause study separately; the experimental group wastaught by accepting a large number of readings which include the sentences ofobjective clause and making some simple dialogues using the objective clausestructures. And in the end, they would practice in the form of translation, oral practiceand dialogue. While the second group was taught by explaining the rules first andthen did a lot of exercises in the form of fill in the blank and multiple—choice. Theexperiment lasted eight weeks and each group had a class for teaching objectiveclause every week in addition to regular curricular learning. Before study, they weretested for their proficiency level of English and the mastery of the objective clause.And at the end of the study, there was a test of objective clause. Meanwhile, there wasa simple questionnaire about their attitudes towards the grammar study and these twodifferent methods.The data of the tests were analyzed by the author with SPSS16.0and the resultsindicated that the overall score of the experiment group was a little higher than thecontrol group especially in the second and the third part of the paper which weretranslation and sentences making. This proved that the implicit instruction based onoutput activities was a better way to study and use some grammar points.