Natalia V. Borisova

Background. A particularly wide choice of approaches and methods are characteristic of modern teaching practice. The growing popularity of implicit teaching techniques based on the concept of learning without awareness of what has been learned, is a bright example of this kind of approaches. Implicit teaching stipulates a more conscious awareness of learners’ characteristics and teaching process conditions which might significantly affect the effectiveness of the approach application.

Objectives. The aim is to identify characteristics of learners, namely, Russian-speaking students of a non-linguistic faculty, which proved to be significant for successful acquisition of specific grammar material when implicit and explicit approaches were used. The focus is on the pedagogical tools contributing to the effectiveness of the approaches.

Methods. The article describes the experience of teaching syntactic structures fronting (structures starting with something else but the grammatical subject) to Russian-speaking students using implicit and explicit approaches. The effectiveness of the material acquisition was evaluated on the basis of two control tests. To determine students’ characteristics which proved to be essential for the effectiveness of the approaches, as well as the useful pedagogical techniques the methods of survey, experiment, comparison and analysis of the data obtained were used.

Results. The principles of leading international concepts concerning the use of implicit and explicit approaches in teaching a second language are considered. Educational materials aimed at students’ implicit acquisition of the targeted grammatical structures have been developed. Texts have been selected and adapted; exercises have been constructed to develop the understanding of the texts. Educational materials have been compiled for the explicit introduction of grammar. A survey was developed and conducted to identify factors that influenced the effectiveness of educational materials.

Conclusions. As a result of the research, it was found that the effectiveness of the implicit approach is limited by such students’ characteristics as a high degree of explicit instruction expectation, trust in this approach, and the habit of relying on the rule formulated by the teacher. The combination of the implicit approach with subsequent Guided Discovery strategies and noticing techniques has shown high efficiency.