The Use of Modal Auxiliary Verbs among Selected Pre-Service Students at A South African Rural University

This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students’ ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a sample of 80 student teachers who were randomly selected in 2016 in the Faculty of Education. 40 participants were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. For the experimental group, training lasted six weeks. Both groups were made to write similar essays and those essays were marked focusing on the students’ ability to use modal auxiliary verbs. The study’s findings revealed that the experimental group performed better than those in the control group in the use of modal auxiliary verbs. Based on the findings, the study recommended explicit grammar instruction in all the students’ level of study in order to overcome the challenges they have in writing English. Thus, time should be created to ascertain that adequate explicit grammar lessons are offered to all pre-service teachers at the university.

Students’ errors in L1 Spanish grammar from the perspective of formal linguistics

This paper studies the role that knowledge about formal linguistics can play in teacher education. In order to do so, this contribution focuses on specific secondary students’ errors and misconceptions when confronted with L1 explicit grammar instruction. Errors are measured with respect to a formal theory of grammar. The rationale for developing this research is that certain aspects of formal theories, such as constituency, recursion, dependency and compositionality function, not only are the building blocks of the utterances, but are also needed for speech processing. If this is the case, acquiring them correctly might be helpful for enhancing literacy, since the very same notions are at the core of both the construction and the understanding of any text. As a second issue, the present paper addresses the question of how the absence of such knowledge models the perspective from which students’ errors are evaluated by the teachers. Errors are described following the theories for analyzing errors in mathematics. A side effect of this approach is that the parallelism between errors made in learning mathematics and in learning the grammatical concepts just mentioned allows broadening the perspective from which the latter is approached.

A Research Investigation of Contextualized Grammar Instruction from the Perspective of English Language Lecturers and Students at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University

This study investigated implicit versus explicit EFL grammar instruction by surveying the beliefs of university lecturers and students at the College of Languages and Translation at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University/KSA regarding this significant issue. Many university lecturers who responded to the questionnaire instrument in the present study supported contextualized (implicit) grammar instruction. Likewise, open-ended questionnaire responses provided by a number of university students, at the above college, revealed that several students favored contextualized grammar instruction while explicit/conscious grammar instruction was the choice of a few of them. Meanwhile, a few students favored a combination of implicit and explicit grammar instruction. In light of the above findings, the author recommends the adoption of contextualized grammar instruction with appropriate attention be given to explicit grammar instruction.

PORTUGUESE GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION: VIEWS OF HERITAGE AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Research on learner perception has shown that foreign language (FL) learners consider formal grammar study quite important (SCHULZ, 1996). However, we know little about perceptions and beliefs of heritage language (HL) learners in what relates to grammar instruction. In a qualitative study on HL instruction at the college level, Schwarzer and Petrón (2005) do include the opinions of their participants on grammar instruction: that formal grammar instruction, as done in FL classes, was not useful for them. In fact, it is now accepted that HL instruction needs to be different from FL instruction (e.g., BEAUDRIE; DUCAR; POTOWSKI, 2014; PARODI, 2008). Nevertheless, most HL learners of Portuguese at the university level take FL classes, even if an HL track is available. Given this scenario, this paper discusses 1) whether HL and FL learners of Portuguese prefer formal or integrated/contextualized grammar instruction, and 2) whether they believe explicit grammar instruction helps their linguistic development in Portuguese. The methodology consisted of a survey among college students matriculated in Portuguese language classes in a U.S. university. Results suggest that HL learners tend to prefer integrated/contextualized grammar instruction, whereas the FL group does not appear to have a clear preference. However, both groups of learners see value in explicit grammar instruction, which does not necessarily contrast with contextualized instruction (ELLIS, 21016). The paper also includes a discussion of pedagogical implications based on the findings presented.Keywords: Heritage language; foreign language; learners’ views; grammar instruction.

Some Effects of Explicit Grammar Instruction and Syntactic Priming on Students’ Written Language Production

Structural or syntactic priming is a phenomenon in which prior exposure to specific language structures either facilitates or interferes with a learner’s subsequent language production [1]. Exposure to English structures through explicit instruction is reported to have inconclusive results. [2] reported that explicit and implicit grammar instruction ends up with automatization. This study reexamines the effect of syntactic priming and explicit grammar instruction on students’ writing. Specific grammatical features frequently appeared on TOEFL (Written Expression Section) test were intensively practiced and then the students took a test whose items were specifically collected from TOEFL practice tests. Finally, the students were assigned to write a short essay. Sentences with similar structures which the students had been exposed to were extracted from the students’ essays. Out of 40 test items, only 59.86% in average could be answered correctly, and all of the grammatical features to which the students were previously exposed were contained in their essays. However, in average only eight out of 18 sentences were grammatically constructed. It can be concluded that although priming method with explicit instruction leads the students to use similar syntactic features in their writing, it seems to have little impact on students’ grammatical knowledge for immediate use in written language production.

Grammar Instruction For Grammatical Competence

This paper is based on a study which investigated the effectiveness of explicit grammar instruction. The instruction was set in the context of teaching students to writeliterature reviews. A pre-test and a post-test were carried out to ascertain whether there was improvement in the students’ command of verb tenses after a lesson where the students were given instruction on the different tenses that are used in literature reviews. The findings of this study lead to the conclusion that explicit grammar instruction is most effective for students who are least grammatically competent.

The Dative Case for Comprehension-Based Grammar Teaching

This paper presents a comprehension-based model for explicit grammar instruction. It is argued that the process of grammar teaching and learning can better be treated as a communicative event with content drawn from pedagogically relevant aspects of contrastive linguistic analyses of the first language (L1) and the the second language (L2). Within a task-based pedagogy, L2 learners can be engaged in concept-forming activities that allow them to develop an understanding of the target grammatical features to facilitate later interlanguage restructuring. This model is illustrated with an exercise in the English dative alternation based on a contrastive analysis of this lexico-syntactic phenomenon in English, the target language and Moroccan Arabic, the students’ L1.

An experimental study on the effect of systemic functional linguistics applied through a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching writing

In the tradition of teaching English as a second language, there has been an increased interest in how functional language descriptions and understandings of genres may be used as resources for making meaning. The present study investigates what impact writing instruction that draws upon systemic functional linguistics (SFL) applied through a genre-pedagogy approach has on students’ ability to write argumentative essays. This includes explicit grammar instruction inspired by SFL, as well as instruction on text structure. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, with a quasi-experiment followed up by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected material. Statistical analyses indicate a significant positive effect on writing performance in the intervention groups, regardless of gender, first language and previous level of writing. As the study lacks control groups, the quantitative analysis was complemented with examples from student texts to illustrate the improvement revealed in the statistical analysis. The findings suggest that SFL applied through a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching writing may help students to improve their writing skills.