Vol. 36 (2026): Volumen 36
Artículos de Investigación

Factors contributing to students’ implicit and explicit learning difficulty of targeted English grammatical structures

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  • Luis Humberto Rodríguez Silva,
  • Silvia Rodríguez Narciso,
  • Cristina Eslava Heredia,
  • Blanca Elena Sanz Martin,
  • Saida Eréndira Arenas Díaz
Luis Humberto Rodríguez Silva
Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes
Silvia Rodríguez Narciso
Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes
Bio
Cristina Eslava Heredia
Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes
Bio
Blanca Elena Sanz Martin
Bio
Saida Eréndira Arenas Díaz
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15174/au.2026.4468

Published 2026-02-25

How to Cite

Rodríguez Silva, L. H., Rodríguez Narciso, S., Eslava Heredia, C., Sanz Martin, B. E., & Arenas Díaz, S. E. (2026). Factors contributing to students’ implicit and explicit learning difficulty of targeted English grammatical structures. Acta Universitaria, 36, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.15174/au.2026.4468

Copyright (c) 2026 Luis Humberto Rodríguez Silva, Silvia Rodríguez Narciso, Cristina Eslava Heredia, Blanca Elena Sanz Martin, Saida Eréndira Arenas Díaz

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This is an exploratory, correlational research and represents a conceptual replication of R. Ellis’ (2006) study. The purpose of this inquiry was to examine 17 grammatical structures in terms of learners’ explicit and implicit learning difficulty. Thirty-three students enrolled in a BA in an ELT program in Mexico at three different levels of proficiency (A1 to B1) were recruited. The following instruments were used to measure implicit and explicit knowledge: an oral elicited imitation test, a timed grammaticality judgement test, an untimed grammaticality judgment test, and a metalinguistic knowledge test. Results showed that students performed better on the explicit tests than on the implicit tests; besides this, there was a non-significant and very weak correlation (rho = -0.18, p = NS) between the two sets of mean scores.

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