Key Terms for Language Teachers - A Pocket Guide - Alessandro Benati
Explicit and Implicit
Key Terms for Language Teachers - A Pocket Guide - Alessandro Benati
Alessandro Benati [+]
University College Dublin
Description
• Second language acquisition is largely implicit in nature as it involves implicit learning. However, this does not mean that L2 learners, especially adults, do not attempt to engage explicit learning in some way. • Language competence is difference than language performance. Competence is the implicit and abstract knowledge of a language possessed by native speakers. It is implicit because we are unaware of this knowledge and are unable to articulate its contents. It is abstract because it does not consist of rules such as “verbs must agree with their subjects” but of other syntactic operations that yield sentences that can be described as having verbs that agree with their subjects. Performance instead, refers to how people use language in concrete situations. • L2 learners come to know much more than what they were taught, practiced, or even exposed to. The conclusion of many scholars is that this knowledge is the result of the interaction of universal principles with data from the environment; that is, input. Because internal mechanisms operate outside of awareness, only implicit learning can be involved. • Any aspects of language that are the result of the interaction of innate and universal principles that govern language with the input data are acquired via implicit learning.