Testing Implicit and Explicit Knowledge: Empirical Evidence of L2 English Genericity Acquisition by L1 Korean Adult Learners

Abstract

In order to investigate adult L2 learners’ genuine acquisition pattern, it is crucial to exclude explicit strategies in the second language experiment. The current study attempts to adopt test instruments which can disentangle explicit and implicit knowledge, and to provide empirical evidence of importance of task choices in second language research by employing both explicit and implicit tasks, following a psychometric study of Ellis (2005). In the current study, a linguistic property of English genericity was tested by seventy seven Korean speaking leaners of English, and two tasks were employed: timed-acceptability judgment task (implicit task) and untimed- grammaticality judgment task (explicit task). More consistent responses were found in the implicit task compared to the explicit one, and it suggests that test methods should be selected with greater consideration in order to enhance the validity of second language research.