SHOGO KIMIZUKA (UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA)

EFFECTS OF THE ORDER OF EXPLICIT GRAMMATICAL INSTRUCTION ON EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING : CURRICULUM AND SYLLABUS DESIGN

Recent English education in Japan calls for the development of practical communication skills through language activities (MEXT, 2018). However, many high school freshmen cite "grammar" as an obstacle to learning English (Benesse Education Research Institute, 2020). This grammatical knowledge is considered to be one of the main constructs of communicative competence (Canale & Swaine, 1980). Therefore, in order to accurately convey information and opinions in English, it is necessary to possess a certain level of grammatical knowledge. Because of this situation, the importance of explicit grammar instruction is beginning to be recognized again (Sato & Kasahara, 2022). Despite this fact, few studies have focused on whether explicit instruction should be given in the order of before or after production activities to be more effective in improving explicit knowledge. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to clarify the effects of the order of explicit instruction on the English grammatical knowledge of Japanese university students. The participants were 61 Japanese university students, who were divided into two groups, each with a different timing of explicit instruction. The target grammars are past subjunctive and past perfect. They were selected from Kanetani’s (2020) list of grammatical items that are difficult for Japanese EFL learners to use freely, as the participants’ English proficiency was at the intermediate level. As a result of ANOVA, although the effect of explicit instruction was found in both groups, there was no significant difference between them. The reasons for the results will be discussed in the presentation.

Shogo Kimizuka is a second-year master's student at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, conducting a research on explicit grammatical instruction on EFL learners. He is also an English teacher in Tsukuba Shuei high school in Japan.