A Comparative Analysis Of The Effect Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On Teaching Non

English grammar learning is vital and a big part of English language learning in highschools. As for grammar learning instructions, the controversy of explicit grammar instructionand implicit grammar instruction has long been existing based on the opposed theories ofexplicit and implicit learning. Until now, a large number of researches have been conducted.Moreover, limited researches on these two instructions have been conducted where English isconsidered as a foreign language in a real classroom setting nowadays. Thus the present studyis to examine the differential effectiveness of implicit and explicit instructions with infinitiveas the target grammar in China where English is a foreign language. Besides, the presentstudy also confirms Reber‘s and Krashen‘s view that complex rules can only be learnedimplicitly.This paper selects the infinitive as the target grammar. The subjects are students in twobest classes of the grade one of Chinese Senior Middle students in Wenzhou, namely, class(15) and class (16). The class (15) was the experiment class and the class (16) was the controlclass. The study was made of three periods and lasted one month. Before the experiment, apre-test was conducted to check their English proficiency level and a questionnaire wascarried out to examine their attitude towards English grammar and the ways their Englishteacher usually adopted when teaching English grammar. During the experiment, the explicitinstruction was applied to teach the infinitive in the experiment class, while the control classreceived the implicit instruction. After the experiment, the participants received a post-testembedded the target grammar and the2nd questionnaire was conducted to check their attitudetowards English grammar and the explicit-implicit instruction.After experiment, the SPSS (11.0) was made use of to study the results of the pretest andthe posttest, mainly two dependent variables, the mean score and the Independent SamplesTest. The mean scores of the post-test and the pre-test indicates that the experiment classperformed much better than the control class， which is in accordance with Schmidt‘s ideathat students‘focal attention was aroused to the concerning linguistic features of infinitiveand an Independent samples of the post-test showed that a big difference existed between thetwo classes (Sig=.010<0.05). However, the result of the2nd questionnaire showed that theimplicit instruction helped improve the confidence of the students in control class in Englishgrammar learning and facilitated students to observe and discover the rules of infinitive.Thus the study indicates that the explicit instruction and implicit instruction arecomplementary on the target grammar regarding infinitive for China senior middle schools.The implicit instruction is necessary to the explicit instruction because it can help improve theinterest and motivation in English grammar learning. Moreover, the explicit instructionfacilitates students to focus on the linguistic rules of infinitive and gets the rules clear, simpleand transparent to the students. Thus the integration of the explicit instruction and the implicitinstruction for infinitive may as well a good idea. Second, the result does not agree withKrashen‘s view that complex rules can only be learned implicitly concerning the targetgrammar by Chinese EFL learners.This paper also implicates that teachers should select appropriate materials for studentsof different English proficiency levels, but also make use of the optimal integration of theexplicit and implicit instruction on the target grammar regarding the infinitive for ChineseEnglish Senior High learners.