Asian Journal of Education and e-Learning (ISSN: 2321 – 2454) Volume 03 – Issue 01, February 2015 Asian Online Journals (www.ajouronline.com ) 18 Explicit and Implicit Learning in Vocabulary Acquisition Ahmad Najafi Nezhad, Marzieh Moghali and Afshin Soori * Department of English Language and Literature, Larestan Branch Islamic Azad University, Larestan, Iran * Corresponding author’s email: andisheh203 [AT] yahoo.com _____________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT---- Vocabulary learning is central and dominant in language acquisition and crucial to the learners' overall language acquisition. One of significant reason of the review is learners encounter difficulties with text and reading. This review is an attempt to investigate the significance of vocabulary knowledge and explain its techniques (explicit/implicit, incidental/intentional) and their effects on reading comprehension, and it can be said that, this review attempts to explain the previous studies on explicit or intentional versus implicit or incidental learning vocabulary. During the review, different explicit and implicit vocabulary techniques is used and explained. The results of this study have important implications for the classroom and make a strong case for implicit and explicit vocabulary instruction. Keywords--- Explicit learning, Implicit learning, Vocabulary acquisition _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION In contemporary societies the need for communication and access to information becomes continuously an increasing part of every field of human initiative. Moreover, multiculturalism is also a fact in today‟s societies, making it necessary for people to be fluent in many languages. In this respect, learning a foreign language rapidly can play a significant role in everyday interactions. For many students, vocabulary instruction consists of looking up words in the dictionary, copying the definitions (usually the shortest ones), and writing sentences using the word.Usually, they are only memorizing a definition and not learning meaning or word acquiring knowledge. Word knowledge is much deeper than simple definition knowledge. Vocabulary is core of a language and has basic importance so that Ellis (1994) claims that "the cornerstone of L2 is its Vocabulary. In old days of language acquisition, vocabulary learning was given little importance (Alemi and Tayebi, 2011). For years, the popular methodology for learning a second language was to focus on grammar and sentences first and then on vocabulary. Lexical cmpetence is currently acknowledged by many vocabulary specialists to be a core component of communicative competence (Coady & huckin, 1997; Harley, 1996; Richards & Renandya, 2002). Learning of implicit vocabulary involves indirect or incidental while the explicit method involves direct or intentional. As a matter of fact, explicit learning of vocabulary is conscious and is aware of what has been learned but implicit learning of vocabulary is non-conscious and without awareness of what has been learned. Vocabulary learning strategies can also be divided into those that involve (1) explicit, direct or intentional learning and (2) those involving implicit, indirect or incidental learning. There is good reason to believe that both explicit and implicit learning contributes to vocabulary development. Thus, vocabulary learning is most components of a language which helps learners to understand the text and can express the meanings. Second language vocabulary acquisition process involves several different learning processes and, hence, is a very complex phenomenon. Defined generally, explicit and intentional learning are characterized by the consciousness involved in the learning process, and both include the study of decontextualized vocabulary and using dictionaries and glossaries (Rashidi & Ganbari Adiv, 2010). Ellis (2008) defines explicit and implicit knowledge in this way: “Implicit knowledge is intuitive, procedural, systematically variable, automatic, and thus available for use in fluent unplanned language use. It is not verbalizable. ... Explicit knowledge is conscious, declarative, anomalous, and inconsistent (i.e., it takes a form of fuzzy rules inconsistently applied) and generally accessible through control processing in planned language use. It is verbalizable ... like any type of factual knowledge it is potentially learnable at any age” (p.258).