An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Explicit Knowledge and implicit Knowledge in L2 Acquisition

This paper studies the relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge by investigating 53 English majors' explicit and implicit knowledge of 17 English grammatical structures through an oral imitation test and a meta-linguistic knowledge test.A descriptive statistical analysis of the percentage of the correct answers to each structure and that of each subject on both the explicit and implicit knowledge tests showed that great correspondence existed between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge,indicating that the bulk of implicit knowledge was derived from explicit knowledge in the non-target-language context,and that although most subjects had a fairly good command of the tested grammatical structures,there was great difference in their mastery of the structures,the most difficult of which were the ones of irregularity or the ones which are of regularity but complicated in nature.The result demonstrates that acquisition of explicit L2 knowledge and its proceduralization are affected by the nature of the target structure itself.