VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES -----------***----------- TA THANH BINH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TECHNIQUE ON GRAMMAR TEACHING TO A CLASS OF SECOND-YEAR NON-MAJOR STUDENTS AT HANOI NATIONAL UNVIERSITY OF EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY (Vận dụng thủ thuật xây dựng nhận thức ý nghĩa trong việc dạy ngữ pháp cho một lớp sinh viên năm thứ hai không chuyên ở Trường Đại Học Sư Phạm Hà Nội: Điển cứu) PROGRAM I M. MINOR THESIS Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 Hanoi, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES -----------***----------- TA THANH BINH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TECHNIQUE ON GRAMMAR TEACHING TO A CLASS OF SECOND-YEAR NON-MAJOR STUDENTS AT HANOI NATIONAL UNVIERSITY OF EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY (Vận dụng thủ thuật xây dựng nhận thức ý nghĩa trong việc dạy ngữ pháp cho một lớp sinh viên năm thứ hai không chuyên ở Trường Đại Học Sư Phạm Hà Nội: Điển cứu) PROGRAM I M. MINOR THESIS Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 Supervisor: Phung Ha Thanh, M.A Hanoi, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION. Rationales of the study.
Research problems and questions. Scope of the study. Methodology of the study. Significance of the study.
Organization of the thesis .4 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Different approaches to grammar teaching. Zero-grammar approach versus form-focused approaches. Deductive versus inductive approach.
The concept of consciousness-raising. Characteristics of consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising in relation to different approaches to grammar teaching. Consciousness-raising versus practice.
The role of practice in second language teaching. The role of consciousness-raising in second language learning. Studies on learners’ preferences to inductive consciousness-raising tasks. Studies on effectiveness of inductive consciousness-raising tasks.
The context and subjects. The subjects of the study. The researcher role. Pre-treatment questionnaire .18 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Collection of worksheets. Post-treatment questionnaire.20 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. Which types of learning (the inductive consciousness-raising or the deductive approach) did the students prefer before and after the implementation?. What are the possible reasons for their preferences?.
Reasons for the preference of deductive learning. Reasons for the preference of inductive consciousness-raising. How different were students’ evaluations on inductive consciousness-raising and deductive learning?. In terms of interestingness.
In terms of difficulty. In terms of usefulness. What were students’ opinions about learning grammar rules without practice? 25 3. To what extent did students succeed in discovering the target rules?.
Success rates from the analysis of worksheets. Success rates from the analysis of students’ self-reflection. Failure rates in comparison. Reasons for failure.
Success rates and the difficulty degrees in comparison. To what extend, did they remember the rules that they had discovered by themselves?. Test results and success rates in comparison .32 CONCLUSION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS. Summary of main findings.
Limitations and suggestions for further research .38 APPENDICES LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS Title Page Table 1 Reasons for students’ preferences 21 Table 2 Subjects’ evaluations on the two types of learning in terms of 24 interestingness Table 3 Subjects’ evaluations on the two types of learning with regards to 24 difficulty Table 4 Subjects’ evaluations on the two types of learning with regards to 25 usefulness Table 5 Students’ opinions about learning without practice 25 Table 6 Students’ success rates in discovering rules 26 Table 7 Rule discovering failure rates in comparison 29 Table 8 Success rates of rule discovering and the difficulty degrees in 31 comparison Table 9 Test results and success rates in comparison 32 Chart 1 Students’ success rate in discovering rules 27 Chart 2 Students’ self-reflection on their rules discovering 28 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Rationales of the study According to Ellis (2006: 101), grammar has held and continues to hold a central place in language teaching. Indeed, grammar has played an important part in language education, explaining why grammar still has occupied a considerable space in current language course-book materials. Moreover, the question of how grammar should be approached has been in the arena for discussion for a century, proving that teaching grammar is a matter of great concern by second language theorists.
In practice, a great amount of time in language teaching syllabuses has also been spent on grammar; and to many teachers teaching a language mainly involves dealing with its grammar. In Vietnam, the approach to grammar teaching that has been favoured by most teachers of English is the deductive one, where teachers play the role of knowledge providers and learners’ role is limited to receivers. Such way of teaching grammar is not only tiring for teachers for they have to spend most of lesson time talking, presenting, explaining, and correcting grammar practice exercises, but learners also find it boring to attend long-lasting lessons in silence. More importantly, deductive teaching does not foster learners’ autonomy because of its teacher-led quality.
As a result of the deficit in self-studying skills, learners have to depend greatly on the teacher for the main source knowledge, thus restricting their learning success. Using inductive consciousness-raising tasks in teaching grammar rules is one of the possible solutions to the problems discussed above, because it not only relieve teachers from the burden of speaking, enhance learners’ autonomy and create motivating learning environment but it is also expected to be effective in terms of explicit knowledge gains and retention. In an inductive grammar lesson, learners actively work with one another most of the time and the teacher just interferes when help is needed, hence enabling him/her to save a great deal of energy for presentation. Moreover, consciousness-raising tasks require learners to discover grammar rules for themselves; thus encouraging learners’ autonomy in the sense that if learners can find out rules for LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 themselves then they are making significant steps towards being self-reliant and independent.
Furthermore, inductive consciousness-raising involves problem-solving activities, which are believed to be stimulating and motivating to the majority of learners. In terms of effectiveness, inductive learning involves great mental effort, and learners are actively engaged in the meaning-making process, consequently they are more attentive and attain greater retention of the knowledge acquired. Though grammatical consciousness-raising tasks have a firm base in second language acquisition research and have become popular among theorists, they have not been widely used by practitioners. There are several reasons accounting for this fact.
Some teachers are afraid that learners may not prefer the idea of discovering rules by themselves for they normally expect to get knowledge from their teachers. Some project that learners may feel frustrated when learning without practice. Others are concerned if inductive consciousness-raising is effective for learners with low levels of English because it is suggested by some researchers that learners need enough proficiency to perform consciousness-raising tasks. This paper describes a study to investigate whether this expectation has any basis.
Research problems and questions The study purposes to investigate learners’ preferences between the inductive conscious-raising and the traditional deductive approach to grammar teaching, reasons for their liking, their evaluations on two types of learning, their opinions regarding learning without practice, and the effectiveness of inductive consciousness-raising tasks. Specifically, the study aims to address the following questions: 1) Which types of learning (the inductive consciousness-raising or the deductive approach) did the students prefer before and after the implementation? 2) What are the possible reasons for their preferences? 3) How different were students’ evaluations on inductive consciousness-raising and deductive learning? 4) What were students’ opinions about learning grammar rules without practice? LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 5) To what extent did students succeed in discovering the target rules? 6) To what extend, did they remember the rules that they had discovered by themselves? 3. Scope of the study Consciousness-raising is a broad idea which can be applied to various fields of teaching and consciousness-raising itself can be either inductive or deductive. The consciousness-raising implemented in this study is grammatical consciousness-raising, which is conducted inductively through six hypothesis making and testing steps.
The implementation of consciousness-raising tasks, takes place within three lessons of grammar. The first two lessons involve the rules of meaning regarding present continuous tense and modal verb “would”. The third lesson deals with formal rules of indirect question. The study primarily focuses on studying grammatical conscious-raising from learners’ perspectives.
It also investigates how effective grammatical consciousness- raising is. The two aspects of effectiveness investigated are learners’ ability to discover the target grammar rules and their retention of explicit knowledge after the implementation. The subjects in focus are undergraduate students having the pre-intermediate level of proficiency in English. They are English non-major students at Hanoi National University of Education.
Methodology of the study This is a study on grammatical consciousness-raising from learners’ perspective. The subjects were a group of twenty-nine English non-major undergraduate students whose levels of English were pre-intermediate or below. The implementation of three grammar lessons with consciousness-raising tasks was conducted in three consecutive weeks. Data were collected before and after the implementation from pre-treatment and post-treatment questionnaires.
An additional data collection tool was a collection of LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 students’ worksheets. The type of data analysis used in this study was descriptive statistics. Significance of the study In the first place, the research is expected to intensify the researcher’s understanding of grammatical consciousness-raising, thus improving her own teaching quality. Secondly, it is hoped to inspire other teachers of English to carry out further investigations into consciousness-raising, so that it can be employed effectively and widely in English language teaching.
Organization of the thesis The first part, Introduction, briefly introduce the rationales, research questions, methodology, scope and significance of the study. The main part of this paper is designed with three chapters as follows: Chapter 1, the Literature Review, offers the theoretical background to this study by reviewing different approaches to grammar teaching and discussing a number of studies on learners’ preferences and effectiveness of grammatical consciousness-raising. Chapter 2, the Methodology, reports the design of the study, the subjects, the data collection instruments used for this study and the statistical method to analyze the data. Chapter 3, the Findings and Discussion, provides an analysis of the data, the interpretation of the results and discusses some prominent issues arising from the study results.
The last part, Conclusion, draws pedagogical implications including a number of recommendations for university teachers of English to use consciousness-raising tasks in teaching grammar rules. It also points out some limitations of the study and suggestions for further investigations. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1. Different approaches to grammar teaching According to Ellis (2002:167), the two main questions which have been debated in the field of language pedagogy are: 1) Should we teach grammar at all? 2) If we should teach grammar, how should we teach it? The differences among various approaches to grammar teaching stem from how they address these two above questions.
Zero-grammar approach and form-focused approaches Ellis (1985: 229) introduced three possible explanations for the first question: 1) the non-interface position; 2) the interface position and 3) the variability position. The non-interface position advanced by Krashen (Ellis, 1985: 229) distinguishes two types of knowledge: learnt knowledge and acquired knowledge. Krashen (1982) (in Ellis, 2002: 167) maintains that “formal instruction in grammar will not contribute to the development of acquired knowledge - the knowledge needed to participate in authentic communication”; therefore, there is no point in grammar teaching. On the contrary, the interface position lends credence to grammar teaching because these two types of knowledge are not entirely separate (Ellis, 1985: 234).