Implicit Knowledge

Learners possess two kinds of knowledge, explicit and implicit. This claim is widely accepted. Many studies concerned with the two have sought to examine learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge such as Seliger (1979), Tucker, Lambert and Rigault (1977), Hulstijn and Hulstijn (1984), Sorace (1985) and Green and Hecht (1992). This paper will be solely concerned with the distinction of explicit and implicit knowledge and the implication of the two types of knowledge in classroom instruction. Before we are able to understand the application and implication of explicit and implicit knowledge in classroom instruction, we need to take a close look at the distinction of the two forms of knowledge.

II. Distinction of explicit and implicit knowledge

It is closely linked to ‘metalingual knowledge’ (knowledge of the special terminology for labeling linguistic concepts) but not the same, although it is often developed hand in hand with such knowledge. It contrasts with implicit second language knowledge. Learners may make their knowledge explicit either in everyday language or with the help of specially learned ‘technical’ language. While implicit knowledge of a language is knowledge that is intuitive and tacit or the intuitive information upon which the language learner operates in order to produce responses (comprehension or production) in the target language. It can be sometimes called knowledge in action or action-inherent knowledge. Study of linguistics competence is the study of a speaker- hearer’s implicit knowledge. Such knowledge is intuitive and, therefore, largely hidden; learners are not conscious of what they know. It becomes manifest only in actual

Relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge What then is the nature of relationship, if any, between learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge? Does explicit knowledge convert into implicit knowledge through practice, as claimed by Bialystok and argued Sharwood Smith (1981), or does it, in the main, only facilitate the acquisition of implicit knowledge, as suggested by Terrell (1991) and Ellis 1993a?

Such new questions as these begin to arise. The relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge, then, continues to be a key issue. Increasingly, explicit knowledge is being viewed as a facilitator of implicit knowledge, by enabling learners to notice features in the input which they would otherwise miss and compare them with their own interlanguage representations (Schmidt 1990). In a sense, then, explicit knowledge may contribute to ‘intake enhancement’, but it will be only one of several factors that does this. In other words, when we considered the role of consciousness in second language learning, learners who have explicit knowledge of target-language features may be more likely to notice these features in natural input. Also, the process of cognitively comparing what is present in the input with what is the current interlanguage rule is facilitated if learners have explicit knowledge. In these ways explicit knowledge may have an indirect effect on the development of implicit