An Empirical Study On Relationship Between Explicit Knowledge And Implicit Knowledge In Foreign Language Learning

Over the past decades,the dichotomy of implicit and explicit knowledge has been debated hotly in the field of second language acquisition.As for the concepts and roles of explicit and implicit knowledge in second language acquisition,different scholars have different point of views on this issue.The issue is discussed or debated under the‘interface theory’,and the three most prevailing models of this theory are non-interface position,strong-interface position and weak-interface position.The concern behind this discussion is the roles of implicit and explicit knowledge in second language acquisition and the transformation between these two kinds of language knowledge.Considering the above mentioned issue,the research questions of this study are proposed.First,whether there is a transformation between learners’ implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge under non-target language background? Second,whether the learners’ implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge on some specific grammatical structures develop at the same time or one precedes over the other one under non-target language background?55 juniors of English majors are involved in this study.These 55 participants come from two classes and are selected from a local university.Timed grammaticality judgment test and untimed grammaticality judgment test are selected to measure participants’ implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge respectively.After the tests,scores of each participant are calculated and analyzed separately.Then,it is discovered that only 52 participants’ test papers are valid,since the test papers of other three participants are nearly blank.The scores of each participant in timed grammaticality judgment test and untimed grammaticality judgment test are input into SPSS to analyze the correlation between learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge.According to statistic analysis,it is discovered that learners’ implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge are correlated positively.This result indicates that there is a transformation between learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge.Through comparison of learners’ score in timed grammaticality judgment test and untimed grammaticality judgment test of each specific grammatical structure,it shows that most grammatical structures’ explicit knowledge precedes over its correspondent implicit knowledge.This study testifies the weak position of interface theory from the perspective of empirical study.Besides this,the research results also give some implications for teachers’ language teaching while they are coming across the specific grammaticalstructures.