Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On The Acquisition Of English Personal Reference By Senior High School Learners:An Empirical Study

This research focuses on how explicit and implicit teaching works on personal reference acquisition for senior high school students. There is no doubt that personal reference is the most basic grammar structure for the purpose of learning the target language better since it plays a very important role for cohesion and coherence in discourse. In the past 50 years, domestic and foreign scholars have conducted a lot of studies on the effects of explicit and implicit teaching on the acquisition of various grammatical structures, while the acquisition of personal reference has not been paid much attention.Based on the Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis mainly, the study tries to investigate the following two questions:1) How do Chinese senior high students use English personal references and what problems do they have when compared with English native speakers’ narratives?2) What are the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on the acquisition of English personal reference by senior high school students?Students from two intact classes in a senior high school participate in this experiment which lasts for one month, and they are assigned to the explicit group and the implicit group at random respectively. Twelve oral narratives from English native speakers are used as comparative materials as well. Before the teaching experiment beginning, a test is carried out to explore how the students from the two groups use the English personal reference. The data are then compared with native speakers’ oralnarratives to find out what problems students may have. In the teaching experiment, students from two groups get access to different kinds of education: the explicit or the implicit instruction. The data are then collected and analyzed, yielding the following results:1) Full NPs were frequently used in introducing, re-introducing or maintaining the main characters, and pronouns were used less frequently.Only a brief introduction was provided to secondary characters or nothing was done at all. Meanwhile, it is found that there were significant differences between the Chinese EFL learners’ narratives and English native speakers’ narratives, mainly reflected in the quantity and referential strategies.2) Both the teaching methods have made a difference in acquiring the personal reference but the effect of explicit teaching was more significant, and the students from this group were more likely to use more target language expressions appropriately.The study has certain limitations in that it mainly uses the quantitative analysis, the data are from senior one students only, and the sample size is rather small. Future studies will optimize the participants,and take into account both the quantitative and qualitative methods.