| Explicit grammar teaching is not commonly used in teaching foreign languages to young learners. Implicit teaching is believed to be more effective in teaching grammar for young learners concerning their young age and the way they learn. However, it is difficult to use implicit teaching that requires a lot of exposure to the language knowing that the time of teaching foreign / second languages are limited. Therefore, there were studies that explore the effectiveness of using explicit instruction to young learners. This present study was written for the purpose of investigating the effect of Processing Instruction and Implicit Instruction on Indonesian ESL learners in acquiring plural-s. The participants were taken from one of the Indonesian second grade primary schools. They were divided by class into two groups and received 2 different types of instruction: Processing Instruction (PI) and Implicit Instruction (II). In order to examine if there is any significant difference between PI and II, this study used a pre-, immediate post-, and delayed post-test consisting of an interpretation and a production task. The results show that even though PI group gained greater mean, neither PI nor II group made any significant improvement in the interpretation task. On the other hand, both groups improved significantly in the production task but the improvement between PI and II was not significant. In conclusion, both groups made improvements in interpretation and production tasks even though the improvement was not significant. Therefore, the PI group performed as well as group II. |