Attribution Of Reading Comprehension Abilities To Implicit And Explicit Grammatical Knowledge

English reading has been a heated topic in the field of second language acquisition.The researches about learners’ reading ability over the past few decades have added to the list with more and more factors related,such as learner’s speech and vocabulary recognition,schemata of forms of writing,background knowledge,and reading strategies.Above all these are the implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge,two of the crucial factors that possibly affect the learners’ second language reading ability.However,the discussions so far about these two kinds of knowledge mainly just focus separately on three separate dimensions: implicit knowledge,explicit knowledge,and their interface.It is worth noticing that the relationships between or among the two kinds of grammatical knowledge and reading ability have not yet been clarified as far as the respective and combined attributions are concerned to the implicit knowledge and explicit grammatical knowledge,home and abroad.Therefore,it is necessary to study the attribution of learners’ reading comprehension ability to their implicit knowledge and explicit grammatical knowledge.It is of great practical significance in the diagnoses of learners’ difficulties in reading comprehension,as well as in the prediction of the improvement and development of their reading ability.For the answers to the research questions about the effects of implicit grammatical knowledge,and of explicit grammatical knowledge of senior high school students on their English reading comprehension ability,81 senior high school students took part in the empirical attribution tests.First,the subjects received a Vocabulary Size Test to ensure the suitability of difficulty and validity.Second,the subjects sat for pilot tests so that the corresponding times could be obtained respectively for rational and intuitional judgment of grammatical correctness of sentences.Following this,17 grammatical structures were selected as the medium to measure their implicit grammatical knowledge(intuitional)by a timed grammatical correctness judgment test and their explicit grammatical knowledge(rational)by an untimed grammatical correctness judgment test.After all these tests,a test of English reading comprehension ability is administered,so that an attributional analysis of reading comprehension ability to the corresponding implicit knowledge and explicit grammatical knowledge can be made respectively by means of Pearson Product Moment Coefficient Correlation.With descriptive statistics analyses and hypothesis tests with correlation coefficients,it is discovered that the senior high school students’ implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge both have significant impacts on their English reading comprehension ability.More importantly,their implicit grammatical knowledge is attributed to more than their explicit grammatical knowledge.These findings suggest that implicit grammatical knowledge claims greater importance in English reading.These findings are also theoretically reasonable,for the process of reading comprehension is undoubtedly in need of such kind of knowledge.In other words,implicit knowledge,characterized by automatic and efficient processing,is critical for English learners to understand the discourse successfully.In addition,it suggests an implication for the teaching of English reading.English teachers are supposed to pay more attention to the teaching of explicit knowledge on the one hand and,on the other,to explored effective methods to promote the students’ implicit knowledge,which is believed to be transformed from their explicit knowledge.