Exploratory action research on errors in sentence construction (writing) my pupils.

Introduction:

Writing sentence in English is not an easy task  for my 6th class children, Because they are coming from different background and their mother tongue is also different.They are learning English as a second language.As their medium of instruction is Kannada,they hardly get expose to English in a period of 40 minutes a day. Which is not sufficient to acquire the second language. It is the toughest challenge to an English teacher to get an expected learning outcome in an academic year.

Teaching English as ESL/EFL to non-native speakers is a challenging task for any ESL/EFL teacher. The reason is simple, as learners couldn't get a lot of exposure to the target language, the acquisition of the same becomes a mammoth task.Language learners need a lot of exposure to the target language as much as possible both inside and outside the classroom. Learners find it as a gruelling task when they listen to something in English. My research focuses on the hurdles of ESL learners in understanding and learning English phrases and sentences. The main purpose of the research is to evaluate  critically the difficulties of the learners while writing a sentence in English.This is an attempt to over come the problems of my students in writing a simple sentence as well as to facilitate the English language.

    Sentences are just the source of emotions.Now, what exactly a sentence is, It is a group of words put in an order to give a meaningful result. For example if I say, Prabha working office an in, does it make a sense? NO, now if I say,Prabha is working in an office. That makes a sense. Sentence provide us with the framework for the clear written expression of our ideas. The aim in writing is always to write in complete sentences, which are punctuated correctly.Sentences always begin with a capital letter and in either a fullstop,exclamation or question mark,etc.

Exploratory Questions:

1.What are the common mistakes made by pupils while constructing a sentence?

2.Can they able to frame sentences in their mother tongue?

3.What are the difficulties pupils face while constructing sentences?

4.What are the strategies to teach sentence construction?

Data Collection:

 I have asked few questions to collect the information and to check the comprehension of my students in writing.

Students' Questionnaire

1.What is your name?

2.How many people are there in your family?

3.What is your nick name?

4.What are the names of your parents?

5.What are the names of your brothers or sisters? (if you have)

6.What  is your father?

7.When do you celebrate your birthday?

8.Who is your favourite person in the family? Why?

9.Where do you stay?

10.Do you love your family?why?

I attached few answer sheet's of my students as a evidence.

My analysis tools

I have cross checked the answer sheets and collected the following details where they are lacking.

1.Unable to put the ideas in an organised way.

2.Problems in selecting preposition.

3.Use of punctuation marks.

4.Confusions in placing articles in right places.

5.Problems in using linking words.

6.Difficult to organise English sentences.

7.Fail to use auxillary verbs.

8.Failed to capture sentence structure.

9.Unable to comprehend the language.etc.

After consolidating the data I felt that students are able to understand the questions and they can answer in broken sentences or else in their own way without aware of the mistakes.Its a good try.I have appreciated them, It initiated me to think and introspect where we are lacking ,what are the strategies can I use to over come  this problem.l have discussed with my colleagues and I have browsed websites and I found many simple ways to teach  sentence construction.

Understanding parts of speech

To understand easy English we need to break them down into even smaller parts.As sentences are made up of words, more specifically they are made up of parts of speech. A parts of speech defines what your word does in a sentence noun, pronoun,verb,adjective,adverb,preposition, conjunction, if students don't know these parts of speech they can not frame sentences.Once they know them, Now they can use the words to frame sentences.

Now they need to learn how to combine them.A sentence has a subject (the person,place or things that the sentences about) and an action (what the subject is doing) together they express a complete thought).Even the shortest complete sentences in the English language follow this rule." I am"( I is the subject , "am" is the helping verb)

"I ate" - I subject ate- action

Once you have your subject and action, you can start to add more details i.e object

 I ate  a mango.

Supplementary I ate a sweet mango.

For example

By conducting these activities we can teach sentence formation easily where pupils enjoy and learn through these activities. I have consolidated many innovative activities in this pdf.

Click here

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:36890f18-a339-42e8-a034-e8df661be858

Conclusion

Learning process always changes by the time and can help them away from being bored in the classroom. It has been a great experience to indulge them completely in the classroom research on framing sentences. It is important for teachers to observe and reflect that process of teaching. The main purpose of research was to explore the impact of sentence formation on students in class room. This research started because I had noted how difficult it is at the time of teaching English as a second language and to engage the students in discussion and writing assignments related to the topics being studied.The result of this research has led me to believe that sentence frames, as a scaffold,may offer the pupils ,the opportunity to write responses more efficiently. More importantly I have gained much insight into other factors that will greatly enhance the use of sentence construction as a scaffold.I feel I have found a way of structuring lessons to introduce sentence construction from simple ,authentic activities to more content related activities, and finally to extend the use of sentence formation to elaborate and reflect on learning.

Thank you.