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

The 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. A one-page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the online Supporting Information and at

Automated summary

This study administered tests to English learners in Austria and Sweden, and found that the specificities of the learning environment are potentially important in interpreting learner achievement on measures of implicit versus explicit knowledge.