Author Description

This dissertation, "A Study on Chinese Grammatical Instructions: Teachers' Perceptions and Students' Performance" by Lulu, Zhang,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: The majority of scholars proved that the explicit and implicit instructions could measure the rules complexity however the explicit instruction has more centered on the complex rules and since there is no available equivalent criteria of rule complexity; therefore the issue that whether teachers' perceptions are trustworthy on rules complexity is still questionable. My research seeks to fill the gap in Pawel Scheffler's (2011) research Rule Difficulty: Teachers' Intuitions and Learners' Performance by including both explicit and implicit instructions in Chinese teaching to indicate whether there is significant consensus between the teachers' perceptions and students' performance. In this study, 14 teachers were asked to assess the difficulty of ten language points, while 38 students were tested on sentence making for their explicit knowledge and on the timed Grammaticality Judgment Test (timed--‐GJT) for their implicit knowledge. The results of both tests were compared with the teachers' assessment and the Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient was calculated. My hypothesis is that there is a significant negative correlation between the teacher's perception of rules difficulty and the students' performance, that is, the language points that the teachers found difficult were indeed troublesome for the students too. The Spearman's rank order correlation of teachers' perceptions and students' learning were found -0.59 and ‐0.