The Effect of Explicit and ImplicitWritten GJ Tasks on the Nature ofEFL Learners’ Grammatical ProficiencyWhen Rendering WH-Questions

This study is a truly experimental quantitative research with repeated measures design investigating the true nature of L2 grammatical proficiency by focusing on its component parts. It examines the performance of 60 female EFL learners at two levels of proficiency (i.e. High- and Low-Intermediate) using two types of computerized Grammaticality Judgement Tasks in different orders (i.e. explicit and implicit written GJ tasks) per each participant at a one week interval for two weeks to determine the extent to which L2 learnersʹ performance is affected by different independent variables chosen and manipulated out of many others that exist (i.e. explicit and implicit knowledge of WH-movement) as well as the effect of proficiency level on the dependent variable (i.e. L2 participants’ performance on the two GJ tasks) while focusing on subjacency. The null hypothesis is that no relationship exists between the explicitness or implicitness of a GJ task and the EFL participants’ performance on WH-questions. Results from analyzing the elicited measurement data indicate that the performance scores of the two proficiency groups in the two GJ tasks did not differ significantly, and, as a result, the null hypothesis was not rejected.