Factors contributing to students’ implicit and explicit learning difficulty of targeted English grammatical structures

This is an exploratory, correlational research and represents a conceptual replication of R. Ellis’ (2006) study. The purpose of this inquiry was to examine 17 grammatical structures in terms of learners’ explicit and implicit learning difficulty. Thirty-three students enrolled in a BA in an ELT program in Mexico at three different levels of proficiency (A1 to B1) were recruited. The following instruments were used to measure implicit and explicit knowledge: an oral elicited imitation test, a timed grammaticality judgement test, an untimed grammaticality judgment test, and a metalinguistic knowledge test. Results showed that students performed better on the explicit tests than on the implicit tests; besides this, there was a non-significant and very weak correlation (rho = -0.18, p = NS) between the two sets of mean scores.