An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Implicit And Explicit Instructions On Senior High School Students' Acquisition Of Unreal Conditionals

In this thesis,the subjects of the study are English unreal conditional sentences led by the conjunction If.If-conditionals are representative in the category of English subjunctive mood.However,there are few studies on unreal conditionals.At the same time,whether grammar should be taught consciously or unconsciously has always been debated.In other words,this is a debate between implicit instruction and explicit instruction.Therefore,this thesis mainly focuses on the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on the acquisition of unreal conditionals.On the basis of the Noticing Hypothesis and the Interface Position,this thesis presents two research questions:1.Which instruction is more effective between explicit and implicit instruction on the acquisition of unreal conditionals?2.If explicit instruction and implicit instruction are integrated,what are the effects of this teaching method on the acquisition of unreal conditionals?150 Grade Two students of three intact classes were selected at random from a senior high school in Hunan province.Students were assigned at random to one control group and two treatment groups for the five-week experiment.The whole experiment consists of three tests,including a pretest,and an immediate post-test,and a delayed post-test.The scores were collected and analyzed.After the experiment,the author finds out students who received explicit instruction performed better than those who received implicit instruction in the tests.Secondly,as for the group which received the integration of implicit and explicit instruction,they got the highest score among three groups.Therefore,we can infer that integrating implicit instruction and explicit instruction can facilitate the acquisition of unreal conditionals,which provides the empirical proof for teaching unreal conditionals.Finally,this experiment continued only several weeks.And students were selected in the same school.From the perspective of these limits,it is of great importance to arouse more scholars to expand the research subjects and the experimental period.