Effects of the Differential Ordering of Explicit-Implicit Instruction on Learning English Infinitives and Gerunds for Korean High School Students

Abstract

The current study was conducted to examine the effects of differential ordering of instruction (Explicit-Implicit or Implicit-Explicit) on Korean high school students learning of infinitives and gerunds. There has been a growing importance of interactional effects (Hayes, Broadbent, 1988

Sun, Slusarz & Terry, 2005) between explicit and implicit instruction after a long debate on the relative superiority of explicit or implicit instruction exclusively. Accordingly, this has generated a range of studies examining the effects of learning order in foreign language acquisition (Alanen, 1995

N. Ellis, 1993, 2005

Robinson, 1995, 1996). However, it has resulted in inconsistent findings with respect to which learning mode should be applied first: some findings were in favor of Explicit-Implicit (E-I) order, whereas others supported Implicit-Explicit (I-E) order (Bruner & Potter, 1964

Danks & Gans, 1975

Mathews et al., 1989

Reber, Kassin, Lewis & Cantor, 1980

Wyatt & Campbell, 1951). The current study re-examined the effects of differential ordering by conducting receptive and productive tests on two different ordering groups (E-I and I-E). The present study investigated whether there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups (E-I and I-E) post-test performance on receptive and productive tasks regarding English infinitives and gerunds. To this end, the present study generated three research questions. The first and second research questions examined whether differential ordering can produce significant differences in the scores of the receptive and productive post-tests. The final research question examined the learners affective aspects in terms of their emotional feelings, states, perceptions about the types and orders of instruction during and after the treatment. This study involved 30 female students in the 11th grade at a vocational high school in Jeonju. The participants were randomly assigned to either an Explicit-Implicit (E-I) or an Implicit-Explicit (I-E) learning order. As for the E-I group, each lesson initially began with an explicit grammar explanation with a number of controlled tasks assessing the students explicit knowledge about the target grammar. Subsequently, implicit story-reading and discussions of meaning-focused questions followed. In contrast, for the I-E group, the order of explicit and implicit instruction was reversed, with identical contents and tasks covered during the lessons. An independent samples t-test on the learners performance in the receptive tasks revealed that implicitly-initiated instruction was more effective. This was in line with Mathews et al.s (1989) findings, showing the superiority of the I-E instruction order for learning a rule. The results confirmed that the optimal agenda for learning rules is to build a certain degree of foundation on implicit knowledge prior to encountering concrete models of the rule. In the current study, the I-E groups superior results were accounted for by depth of processing, presence of guided learning, and low metalinguistic awareness. However, no significant difference was found between the two groups scores on the productive test. This implies that there is not sufficient evidence to support that instruction order (E-I or I-E) improves learners productive performance in a second language (L2). However, this non-significant difference may have been due to the students low proficiency level, a higher accuracy requirement in the task, and lack of previous practice on language productive tasks. In conclusion, this study confirms that as for low-proficiency learners of English, implicitly-initiated instruction (I-E) might be more conducive to promoting ones receptive performance in L2 grammar learning. As for L2 productive performance, the effects of differential ordering has to be reexamined in future studies.