Article+Reflection+on+The+Effects+of+Explicit+and+Implicit+Instruction+on+Grammar+by+Emrullah+Yasin+Çiftçi

I have chosen the article “The Effects of Explicit and Implicit Instruction on Grammar” by Cubukcu and Nigdeli (2011) to write a reflection on it. This article focuses on the long-run debate over implicit or explicit instruction on grammar and they have conducted a study at a western university in Turkey. They have chosen prep students from two different intermediate classes in the department of School of Foreign Languages at that university. One of these classes has been taught implicitly and the other has been taught explicitly for four weeks. The findings of that study indicate that both of these instructions have become successful in terms of teaching grammar because both classes seems to have benefited from those explicit and implicit instruction on grammar somehow equally. This study has clearly lots of limitations to have such a general idea about teaching grammar explicitly or implicitly. First of all, they have just two classes, one of them is controlled and the other is experimental group. They have chosen some topics like “First Conditional” and I believe such grammar topics don’t matter for both explicit and implicit teaching. They are easy to be grasped in both ways. They could have applied their method with more students and classes and they could have chosen a range of topics for a longer period. In that way, I could trust their findings, but their study has no value for me and it contains lots of meaningless findings. That’s why, I will debate the role of explicit and implicit teaching in my reflection paper on my own and I don’t want show their study as a reference. So, there are some questions that should be investigated: Which instruction is more successful or are both of them effective equally? To whom should we apply implicit or explicit instruction? What are advantages and disadvantages of these instructions? The discussion over implicit or explicit teaching is one of the most debated issues in the area of ELT and this discussion is still going on among academicians. Let’s firstly see what grammar is. Grammar is the branch of linguistics dealing with the form and structure of words or morphology, and their interrelation in sentences, called syntax. The study of grammar reveals how language works, an important aspect in both English acquisition and learning. Grammar is considered as the basis for other skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Grammar also allows learners to put their ideas into intelligible sentences so that they can successfully communicate. At the same time, grammar is necessary for learners to understand counter party. When the historical development of grammar teaching is examined, it is seen that it was taught firstly in a deductive fashion with grammar-translation method in which mother tongue was used and it has moved towards more communicative fashions and functional side of a language is more emphasized. That has led to importance of implicit instruction because it is advocated that implicit instruction shapes the way towards communicative usage of a language. However, it has certainly disadvantages. Many studies have showed that it is really difficult for adults to learn a language in subconscious process the same as children acquire a language because adults use a deductive reasoning when they become adults. The total applying of implicit instruction to adult classes seems to be futile because adults want to analyze what they have learned. Okay, they also like discovery of structures but at the end they want a formula of what they have learned. Also, implicit instruction could be both energy and time consuming and it sometimes may lead to wrong understanding of rules and wrong usage of them. In explicit one, learners are made aware of language rules and they are aware of their development but it restricts the language use because learners may sometimes stuck in rules and they may ignore the functional aspect of a language. Young learners favor implicit instruction because of their developmental stages since they don’t use deductive reasoning yet. In my opinion, we cannot apply these instruction types on grammar to any context. As teachers we should firstly analyze our student profiles and our teaching aims and purposes. As it is stated above, both of the instructions have their own advantages and disadvantages in different ways and contexts, so we should keep these in our minds when we consider which one to apply. Maybe we want to mix them in our classes and studies show that it is up to us and none of them superior to the other. Finally, I know the discussions on this issue will go on for years but I believe we will develop a new mixed way to maximize the communicative aspect of the language teaching. This is needed definitely for Turkey context!
 * The Effects of Explicit and Implicit Instruction on Grammar **

EMRULLAH YASİN ÇİFTÇİ