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MEASURING UNIVERSITY-LEVEL L2 LEARNERS’ IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Runhan Zhang
Runhan Zhang*
Affiliation:
Central University of Finance and Economics
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Runhan Zhang, School of Foreign Studies, Central University of Finance and Economics, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R. China. E-mail: zhangrunhan_nora@hotmail.com
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Abstract

Although many theoretical issues revolving around implicit and explicit knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition hinge on the ability to measure these two types of knowledge, few empirical studies have attempted to do so. However, R. Ellis (2005) did develop a battery of tests intended to provide relatively separate measures. This study aims to validate the use of Ellis’s test battery in an English as a foreign language context and to investigate the extent of Chinese first-year university students’ implicit and explicit L2 knowledge. Test scores loaded on two factors, as in R. Ellis (2005), thus demonstrating construct validity for the tests as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge in a population of Chinese university-level learners of English in a Chinese (as opposed to English as a second language) context. These learners were found to have higher scores on measures of explicit knowledge than on those of implicit knowledge because of the instruction they had received and their English learning environment.

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Articles
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 457 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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