A study on Chinese grammatical instructions: teachers' perceptions and students' performance

Abstract

The majority of scholars proved that the explicit and implicit instructions could measure the rules complexity however the explicit instruction has more centered on the complex rules and since there is no available equivalent criteria of rule complexity; therefore the issue that whether teachers’ perceptions are trustworthy on rules complexity is still questionable. My research seeks to fill the gap in Pawel Scheffler’s (2011) research Rule Difficulty: Teachers’ Intuitions and Learners’ Performance by including both explicit and implicit instructions in Chinese teaching to indicate whether there is significant consensus between the teachers’ perceptions and students’ performance. In this study, 14 teachers were asked to assess the difficulty of ten language points, while 38 students were tested on sentence making for their explicit knowledge and on the timed Grammaticality Judgment Test (timed--‐GJT) for their implicit knowledge. The results of both tests were compared with the teachers’ assessment and the Spearman’s rank order correlation coefficient was calculated. My hypothesis is that there is a significant negative correlation between the teacher’s perception of rules difficulty and the students’ performance, that is, the language points that the teachers found difficult were indeed troublesome for the students too. The Spearman’s rank order correlation of teachers’ perceptions and students’ learning were found -0.59 and ‐0.34 respectively, however, the results of their p‐value were 0.07 and 0.34 respectively, the hypothesis was doubted. The implication of the conclusion on the selection of teaching method is discussed.