Forty years ago, the leading SLA researchers believed that while explicit grammar instruction helped learners learn about the language (i.e., develop conscious knowledge of), that this knowledge did not lead to true acquisition or fluency (Krashen 1981). In the following decades, further research found that explicit learning can infact lead to implicit knowledge through practice and interactive language use among adult learners (Long 1991 and DeKeyser 2003, 2007). Moreover, researchers found that explicit grammar instruction was generally more effective than implicit instruction, particularly when teaching adults complex structures that widely differ from their native language (L1) (Spada & Tomita, 2010). Furthermore, more recent research on the effectiveness of using corrective feedback while teaching Turkish, found that explicit feedback, both oral or computer-mediated, is more effective than implicit feedback (Yilmaz 2013).
For these reasons, CeLCAR will be using the information gained during the center's language acquistion research project, to coordinate research on the effectiveness of both explicit grammar instruction and explicit feedback when teaching adult learners of Central Asian languages, those which are structurally dramatically different from English. Our planned experiments will investigate which structures and topics benefit most from explicit versus implicit instruction, and which types of student errors are most effectively addressed with explicit versus implicit corrective feedback.
