Abstract

Implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge have long been at the centre of second language acquisition research, whereas language proficiency is often examined in language testing. Viewing language proficiency in terms of implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge would provide helpful insight to bridging the two fields. However, very few empirical studies have focused on the relationship between these two types of knowledge and general language proficiency except Elder and Ellis (2009). The results of Elder and Ellis (2009) indicated that language proficiency can be conceptualized as involving both types of knowledge with explicit knowledge of a second language (L2) being a stronger predictor of general L2 proficiency. Likewise, all four measures used in the current study to elicit English learners’ implicit and explicit  knowledge of English were found to correlate significantly with the English proficiency measure in a Chinese (as opposed to English as a second language) context. Nevertheless, only the two measures of implicit knowledge were found to predict the participants’ general English proficiency score. Reasons for the difference may be attributed to several factors, including the use of different proficiency tests and the adoption of slightly different statistical analysis methods.

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