Effects Of Integration Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On English Majors' Writing Competence

English writing, as one of the fundamental skills in the process of English learning, is regarded as indispensable part in English teaching. However, it is difficult for scholars and English teachers to find out an effective teaching method on English writing. In recent decades, researchers, English teachers, educators have made sound suggestions on English writing and put forward many useful methods of English writing teaching. However, the demerits of the previous methods of English writing teaching were shown in teaching practices. In the field of SLA, For many years, it has been a controversial topic that a foreign language should be learned consciously or unconsciously, which was called explicit and implicit instruction in English teaching practice. In recent decades, researches concerning the explicit and implicit instruction mostly focus on the teaching of grammar, oral English and vocabulary, and the application of explicit and implicit instruction to the English writing teaching is hardly found. Moreover, previous studies concerning explicit and implicit instruction mostly focused on the comparison between the two teaching approaches, and few studies were conducted with the integration of explicit and implicit instruction. Based on the current research and teaching situation, the present study intends to integrate the explicit and implicit instruction on English writing in order to find out a more effective English writing teaching approach.The present study examines the different effects of the integrated explicit and implicit instruction and the mere explicit instruction by conducting a teaching experiment. Participants from two natural classes in Chengdu Institute Sichuan International Studies University are sophomores majoring in English. All the participants are divided into two groups, one of which is experimental group(EG), and the other one is controlled group(CG). The integrated explicit and implicit instruction is applied to EG, and the teacher in CG merely adopts explicit instruction. The pre-test is carried before the formal experiment to testify whether writing competence of the participants in two groups is different, and students in EG are asked to finish the pre-experiment questionnaire so as to collect their attitudes to English writing and writing teaching methods. After 16 weeks of teaching experiment, the pre-test is employed to examine the effects of the integrated instruction and the post-experiment questionnaire was delivered to the students in EG. The following are main findings drawn from the results of the study analyzed by SPSS 16.0.(1) Both integrated instruction and the explicit instruction can improve students' writing competence. However, the integrated explicit and implicit instruction on English writing is more effective than the explicit one.(2)To be specific, as for writing contents, writing organization and language use, the integrated instruction do a better job than the explicit instruction.(3)Results of the questionnaires show that the integrated explicit and implicit instruction can arouse the writing interest of the participants.At last, based on the main findings of the present study, the author put forward some pedagogical suggestions for college English teachers. They should make full use of advantages of explicit and implicit instruction respectively in order to improve students' writing competence.