The Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Instruction On Learners' Acquisition Of Lexical Chunks

With the development of SLA(second language acquisition)research in recent years,English instruction approaches have also gone through great changes.Explicit instruction and implicit instruction has gradually become one of the hot topics in SLA.A plethora of studies have been conducted to understand explicit and implicit instruction,but most of them focused on lexical,grammatical and pragmatic aspects,while research on lexical chunks is scarce.Therefore,this study explores the effects that explicit and implicit instruction have on the acquisition of lexical chunks for non-English undergraduates.The participants of the study were 60 students from a university in Hunan province,who were at the same English proficiency level and majored in accounting.The learners were randomly assigned to an EI class and an II class.Three research questions were addressed:(1)Do both explicit instruction and implicit instruction facilitate the comprehension and production of lexical chunks for non-English undergraduates? If yes,how long can it extend?(2)Which type of instruction is more effective,explicit instruction or implicit instruction?(3)What attitude do learners hold towards explicit instruction and implicit instruction? Two weeks of explicit/implicit instruction for the target lexical chunks was respectively implemented on the two classes.After the completion of instruction,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were administered to examine the immediate and long-term effects of explicit and implicit instruction.And an exit survey was also conducted to explore attitudes that learners held to explicit and implicit instruction.The results of the research showed that:(1)In the immediate post-test,explicit instruction was greatly facilitative of non-English undergraduates' the learning of lexical chunks,while implicit instruction did not seem to work;(2)the effect of explicit instruction declined in the delayed-post test and showed no salient difference from implicit instruction;and(3)learners preferred explicit instruction and suggested the integration of explicit and implicit instruction.This study enriches the empirical research of explicit and implicit instruction in terms of lexical chunks to some extent.It also carries some pedagogical implications for the instruction of lexical chunks for non-English major undergraduates.