The effects of implicit and explicit grammar teaching tasks

SLA research informs us that both implicit and explicit instructions are important. However, current research does not address how best to balance implicit versus explicit instruction, and how and when to introduce explicit teaching to young learners. In this study, we begin to address such questions by focusing on the teaching of the 3^rd-person singular –s. This morphosyntax construct has been observed to be difficult for children to acquire by having mere exposure in instructional FL settings. The present study introduced three inductive tasks which differed in their degree of explicitness. The first task (task 1) directed attention primarily to meaning; task 2 directed attention to forms without explicit explanations; and task 3 was a metalinguistic task to discover the rules of this morphosyntax. The tasks were implemented among 120 fifth-grade students in Japan who had been receiving meaning-focused instruction since the 1^st grade level. The results indicated that there were substantial inter- and intra-individual variabilities (variabilities across individuals as well as within individuals) and the effects of different tasks were influenced by each student’s developmental level, or what Vygotsky (1978) would describe as their Zone of Approximate Development. For example, when children showed variable responses within a task, introducing and/or repeating explicit tasks turned out to be effective.