Measuring Teenage Learners’ Automatized, Explicit, and/or Implicit Knowledge: A Question of Context?

Abstract

AbstractThe present study administered six test instruments to 13‐ to 14‐year‐old learners of English in Austria and Sweden (N = 213), countries offering settings with more explicit and implicit learning environments, respectively. Confirmatory Factor Analyses for Austria yielded a factor comprising timed grammaticality judgment tests, an oral narrative test, and elicited imitation, labelled in this study Automatized and/or Implicit Knowledge, and a factor including an untimed grammaticality judgment test and a metalinguistic knowledge test, named in this study Explicit Knowledge. In the Swedish context, goodness‐of‐fit indices provided some evidence that a single‐factor model shows a better fit, although a comparison of this model with two‐factor models did not reach statistical significance. The findings point to the potential importance of considering the specificities of a learning environment in interpreting learner achievement on measures of the implicit versus explicit knowledge spectrum.