Can Grammatical Knowledge Predict Chinese Proficiency?

Abstract

This study explored how to assess the explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of learners of Chinese, and their relationship to learners’ overall Chinese language proficiency. The participants were 85 learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at universities in the USA. A test battery included three parts: (1) a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT) and an oral repetition task for implicit grammatical knowledge; (2) an untimed GJT and an error correction task for explicit grammatical knowledge; and (3) a general language proficiency test. A set of correlation coefficients were computed to explore the contributions of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge to overall proficiency. The results showed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the CFL learners’ implicit grammatical knowledge and their proficiency scores, but there was a strong relationship between their explicit grammatical knowledge and their general proficiency. Further multiple regression analyses demonstrated that explicit knowledge better predicted the CFL learners’ general L2 proficiency. These findings are discussed in light of how the relationship of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge with general proficiency might be influenced by learners’ actual level of proficiency or learning stage and how general proficiency is tested. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.