Classroom research

 

Topic:   Problem in sentence formation without grammatical errors.

Introduction: Language has an important role in communication and share ideas. Writing is the productive way of expression. Therefore it is necessary that written language should be clear and meaningful. But I found the most of my students are not able to frame meaningful sentences. For this research I selected 5 students of class 6 who are studying in Kannada medium and English as their second language. From this research I hope to identify the actual problems of these students while framing  sentences in English and various methods to solve those problems.

Research questions:

1. What are the actual problems of students in sentence formation?

2. Are the other language teachers facing same problem?

3. Is there parents support for children to write in English ?

4. What are all the opportunities students getting to write in English? 

5. What are all the methods I can use to help students to write in English? 

Evidence of the problem:

I asked my students to answer for questions by looking into the picture. They were able to answer for those questions but complete sentence was not there and a few students did grammatical error in sentence formation. 

These are the samples of my students' writing.

Data collection:

Later I started collecting the data by interviewing students. To know the actual problems of students in sentence formation I asked them a few questions like

1. Are you able to  read and  understand a sentence or question?

2. Do you know about sentence structure?

3. Can you write sentences  in mother tongue?

4. Do you need more practice in sentence formation? 

 5. Who will help you at home to write English sentences?

After this I came to know that students are able to read and understand questions and can answer in broken sentences. While answering in complete sentence they are worried about sentence structure because it is different from their mother tongue. A few expressed that they need more practice in sentence formation in different tenses. And all these students are not helped by their parents as they are unable to understand English language.  Overall I noticed that these students need more practice and more exposure to write in English. 

In the next step I spoke with other language teacher. She said students are able to frame correct sentences but they do mistake in spelling. I introspected myself about  the opportunities that I'm giving to my students for practice. Then I realized that I focused more on listening comprehension and reading. So the students are unable to write independently. 

Then I browsed some websites to know difficulties in sentence formation among primary students and various steps, methods and activities to be conducted in the school.

Action phase:

In this phase, I planned to give more opportunity and activities step by step for my students to enhance the ability of writing sentences in English. 

Step1. Giving students content words and structural words along with functions. For this substitution tables are used to know change of verbs in different tenses and subject. 

Example for simple substitution table:

           

Step 2. Drilling the sentences in classroom and make all students to participate. Using substitution table, students write sentences and present to the whole class.

Step 3. Asking simple questions, including wh questions and yes or no questions and instructing the students to give answer in written form.

Example: where do you live?

                  Do you like playing?  Etc..

Step 4. Rearrange the jumbled words in correct order to make sentence. Work sheets can be used.

Example:

Step5. Answer for the questions in a sentence by looking into the picture and word clues. Here students get chance to frame sentences independently.

 While following these steps I understood that students more are interested in attempting innovative way of learning rather than traditional method.

Conclusion:

It is my first experience of classroom research so I gathered more information about action research from articles and websites. And CELT programme motivated me to do this in an effective way. After starting this research, I realized the real need of learning process among students. They are participating well and some changes are visible now. I should also give extra importance for late boomers. After completion of this work,  I hope that I shall get fruitful result from my students.