Implementing Tik-Tok Game Cards to Reorient ESL Learners’ Temporal Preposition Acquisition

Abstract

IntroductionThe ultimate objective of the education system of Malaysia is to produce learners who are capable of mastering both Malay Language, the national language and English Language, the official and international language in Malaysia. In the context of Malaysia, English Language is positioned as the second language of the nation. Thus, the education system is tailored based on the education ministry's vision. Policies such as Highly Immersive Program (HIP) and Dual Language Program (DLP) are introduced for boosting the local English Language proficiency level.English Language has started at the root level of education where in pre-schools, children are exposed with English alphabets and simple vocabulary. After proceeding to the level of lower primary school level, children are further exposed with basic sentence structures about English Language and its usage such as daily conversations along with syntactical knowledge of the language itself. Children are then exposed to higher structural level of the language such as paragraph constructing and short essay writing. Only then the children will be exposed with a much more complex level of English essay writing and text summarizing during secondary school level. Then, English Language will be widely used during tertiary education level in colleges and universities whereby most of the references, writings are in English Language. From the explanations above, it is not hard to see that, English Language is widely implemented in the nation's education system. Thus, it should be said that, Malaysian ESL learners are supposed to be proficient in the language itself, however, things do not seem developing towards the desired direction.Malaysian ESL learners still face difficulties especially when it comes to grammatical sections of the language itself, especially preposition (Loi et.al 2017, Loke et.al 2013. Preposition is categorised among the main eight-word classes or be known as parts of speech alongside nouns, pronouns, verbs, determiners, adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. Preposition plays its role as a connector and dictating a noun and pronoun in sentences. There are various types of prepositions that stretches to the aspect of time, direction, positions, places and degrees (Morenberg 1997; Mukundan 2009). Prepositions are rather unique compared to other grammatical word classes as the prepositions themselves are polysemy, or can be explained as words with many meanings in different contexts. They are short, yet, important enough to dictate the meaning of the sentence itself (Arjan et.al 2013). Among the factors that caused Malaysian learners to stumble when it comes to preposition learning are first language interferences, different prepositional usages across languages and the abstractness of the prepositions themselves (Loi et.al 2017, Loke et.al 2013, Saravanan 2015. Past studies suggest that interactive and unorthodox learning methods are indeed effective in helping the ESL students in English mastering. In the studies by Hang et.al (2017), partic...