Explicit and implicit knowledge of English tenses in primary school EFL learners in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The linguistic knowledge of foreign language learners appears to be partly implicit and partly explicit. Learners rely on implicit knowledge when involved in spontaneous everyday communication, while explicit knowledge enables them to reflect on language structures and recognise or use metalanguage. The present study investigated the explicit and implicit foreign language learners’ knowledge of English tenses in the Bosnian context at the end of the first educational cycle, i.e., primary school, by means of a metalinguistic test, an untimed grammaticality judgement test and an elicited imitation test. The study aimed at exploring the variability in the quantity and quality of EFL learners’ knowledge and the relationship between different types of knowledge based on three factors, namely gender, average grade, and starting age. While revealing quite limited knowledge of the target structures, the findings showed no significant difference between explicit and implicit knowledge, while the correlation coefficients between them were relatively high. Out of the three factors, a three-way ANOVA showed that only average grade proved to have a significant main effect on EFL knowledge. The interaction effect of gender and grade was significant on the participants’ overall EFL knowledge and their explicit knowledge, whereas a significant interaction effect of all three factors was confirmed only on explicit knowledge.

Keywords

• foreign-language knowledge
• explicit knowledge
• implicit knowledge
• age
• gender
• average grade