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THE EFFECTS OF EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT INSTRUCTION ON GRAMMAR
Feryal Çubukçu
Tuğba Niğdeli
27-28 Nisan 2012, Çanakkale
In their article, Çubukçu and Niğdeli try to reveal the effects of explicit and implicit
grammar teaching on prep students who are believed to have same level of proficiency in
English. They begin their paper with the definitions of explicit and implicit grammar and their
use in second language learning classrooms. Then, they explain some terms like implicit
knowledge, explicit knowledge, non-interface position, strong-interface position, weakinterface position. They continue with the position of these two teaching types in grammar
and begin tell the procedure and results of their study in which they have compared two prep
classes in Dokuz Eylül University who exposed explicit and implicit grammar teaching for a
certain period of time and then tested to see the effects of each. At the end, they conclude that
there is no significant difference between these two groups and students benefit from both
types instruction language learning.
As for evaluation of the authors’ ideas, at the introduction part they give quite clear
and detailed information about explicit and explicit grammar teaching with examples and
some metaphors. The article is an interesting one for me since the research is conducted in
Turkey since most articles we encountered written regarding students from different
countries. The article was quite successful in terms of providing clear examples without too
much unnecessary details. Some articles are too abstract for us to understand and use a
complicated language but this was quite understandable and simple. The two perspectives the
authors choose are most controversial issues in grammar teaching. Since there are more and
more advocates of implicit teaching as a result of constructivist and communicative
approaches, the authors provide a different perspective by showing us there may be no
difference between two methods within the same group of students. Although, I am not sure
this may be true for other learners too, I got surprised to see their conclusion since I have
always though there are differences between explicit and implicit teaching. They look
completely different methods that will result different achievement levels for me.
When our country is considered in terms of application of these two methods, the
dominance of explicit grammar teaching is seen from beginner to more advanced levels
already. As for prospective teacher, we always argue the effectiveness of these two methods
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for our classrooms. Regarding the opportunities and resources in our public schools and state
universities, most teachers have to prefer explicit one, since the implicit one requires the
effective use of more resources and more time. However, I believe implicit instruction can
also be implemented our instruction in all levels but paying attention to our purpose to teach
English. For example, for YDS or KPDS classroom it would be very time consuming to teach
grammar implicitly since students have a limited time period and are responsible to remember
the grammar rules since they do not need to spontaneous use. However, for especially young
learners classrooms we need to teach grammar implicitly because of the children’s cognitive
development. Since they have not reach the formal operational stage offered by Piaget
(Cameron, 2001), the rules and explicit metalinguistic explanations are too abstract for them.
They need as the authors explain “to be exposed grammatical structures in a meaningful and
comprehensible context in that they may acquire, as natural as possible, the grammar of the
target language” (2012). I also believe that our students up to university need more
communicative approaches because we have always seen that they are proficient in grammar
they have very high scores but they do not have the ability to communicate. They are afraid of
talking in English. Therefore, implicit instruction should be given importance which as the
authors suggest put an emphasis on communicative tasks over grammar structures. This is
also important for scaffolding since communication is one of the strong tools of social
scaffolding in any learning environment. For our country, it may not be possible to use only
implicit grammar since our student do not have any exposure to target language outside the
classroom and this may make difficult to infer the grammar rules from only the very wellstructured tasks provided in the classes. Another consideration may be the effectiveness of our
teacher. Unfortunately, most of our teachers score below their counterparts from different
countries since they do not like their job very much. Nevertheless, as prospective English
teachers we should balance the explicit and implicit grammar teaching in our classrooms
revising our curriculum and purpose of teaching English. We should pay more and more
attention to implicit one in all levels.
I agree with the authors in prep classrooms there may be no difference between
explicit and implicit teaching but I have some doubts about their conclusions. First of all, at
the beginning they use a pre-test to measure the students’ level of proficiency but I do not
believe that with a multiple choice grammar test we cannot conclude that students have the
same proficiency level. In addition, although they are exposed to different teaching methods
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the students got the same post-test. Of course, it is important for equal treatment of the
participants but we need to pay attention teaching ant testing consistency if we want more
reliable results. I also agree with the metaphors they use for explicit and implicit grammar
teaching ie. children’ learning of second language which is natural and automatic for implicit
learning and adult’s learning of second language for explicit learning. I think this comparison
gives the idea implicit learning is equal to acquiring since it is task-directed and studentdiscovered and explicit learning which is structure controlled and teacher-directed is equal to
learning. I have some doubts about whether these two types do not cause any difference in
language classrooms. I think we need more test about with different levels of students
increasing the types of testing methods.