The Relationship between Knowledge Types and Past-time Inflectional Output of UMK Undergraduates

Abstract

The struggle of second language learners in producing output is common. Errors may coincidently occur in their production, especially when it comes to inflectional morphemes even though learners often know the grammatical rules. This error might be due to the learners' level of implicit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, this study explores the type of knowledge that could be more significant in language output. This study focuses on L2 students' knowledge and usage of morphological inflections of past-time forms. These forms include simple past tense, present perfect tense and past perfect tense and thus concern the inflections -ed and - en. It aims to identify the correlation between types of knowledge and ESL learners' output of past time inflections. Using Ellis's construct of implicit and explicit knowledge as the framework, this study explains the use of implicit and explicit knowledge in past time inflectional output. For data collection purposes, three tests namely Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT), Metalinguistic Knowledge Test (MKT) and Written Production Task (WPT) were administered to Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) undergraduates from three campuses with different majors, who speak English as a second language (n=90). The hypothesis of this study is that both types of knowledge may contribute to the successful performance in past-time inflectional output, where implicit knowledge is the primary source of production and explicit knowledge is the monitor in noticing and correcting the errors.