This study investigates the use of two types of Consciousness-Raising (CR) tasks in learning Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA). The sample consisted of 28 Form 2 students who were divided into two groups. Group 1 was assigned with Grammaticality Judgment (GJ) tasks and Group 2 received Sentence Production (SP) tasks for eight weeks. Learners were given a pretest before the treatment and a posttest once they completed the tasks. They were also required to answer questionnaires and some were interviewed. The findings show the two CR tasks promote SVA learning among students but SP tasks are descriptively better than GJ tasks in terms of gain scores.
The goal of this study was to explore the effects of gamification on a short course that aimed to develop soft skills among students of a vocational school in Sabah. English language was used as the medium of instruction during the task and four target grammatical forms were integrated into the gamified context: sequence connectors, conditionals, modal verbs and sentence construction. The gamified context consisted of four levels where the students were expected to solve the challenge before moving to the next level. The gamified activities were named "Zombie Challenge Series" since its narrative derived from the popularity of zombie in the entertainment and technology industry. There were several game elements that were incorporated into the task. The students were interviewed in order to elicit their perception related to the gamified activities. The findings showed that the students became more aware of the linguistic features that they were expected to use and the cognitive skills needed to solve the challenges. They became more motivated to learn and they were able to develop their soft skills better.
Abstract-The study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the classification and hypothesisbuilding/checking in promoting the learning of the verb "be" in three structures: affirmative, negative and interrogative. The subject comprised 56 ESL students of 17 years old in a vocational college who were assigned into an experimental group and control group. They were given a treatment of six tasks on classification technique and hypothesis-building/checking and the instruments were pre-test/post-test, questionnaire and interviews. The t-test revealed the difference of means in pre-test/post-test scores within the experimental group was significant and the mean difference in gain score was also significant when compared with the control group. The findings from the interview provided explanations how these techniques assisted the learners' learning and the results from the questionnaire indicated positive opinions of the learners on the use of the techniques in learning the verb "be".
Irregular verbs are one of the most challenging grammatical structures for ESL students to learn. The Dual-Mechanism Model states that there are two mechanisms of how regular and irregular verbs are processed, regular verbs are processed through rule application mechanism whereas irregular verbs are retained and retrieved from associative memory. This sometimes results in the heavy use of rote-learning and raw memorization of irregular verbs in order for ESL learners to acquire these grammatical structures. However, it is implied that dictogloss, an information gap task, may assist learners to learn irregular verbs without strong emphasis on drilling and memorizing. 34 students of a vocational college in Malaysia were selected and assigned into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was given three types of dictogloss tasks involving three different cognitive processes of matching, ordering and listing which required them to conjugate irregular verbs whereas conventional drilling exercising was given to the control group. Paired and unpaired samples t-tests indicate that dictogloss is effective in facilitating learners' mastery of past tense forms of irregular verbs. The findings from the questionnaire also denote positive perceptions on the
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