Preliminary study : English Language Acquisition and Classroom Activities of L2 in Vietnamese Children, Grade 5

Författare

Vi Thanh Son

Summary, in English

This study attempts to determine how English Language teaching and learning methods in a Vietnamese classroom might affect learning output. A classroom observation using COLT (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching–part A) and recordings of four Vietnamese children at grade 5 made immediately after the lesson concluded have been analysed. The analysis of the children' transcript is made based on the Processability Theory (PT) by Manfred Pienemann (1998), with different stages of English acquisition as Second Language (L2), especially on stage 5 Subject verb agreement (3Sg-s). This was done to hopefully get an indication of how and if the children acquired the subject-verb agreement in their speech, as well as how they produce utterances with 3Sg-s in a natural setting. The result shows different issues. Three of the four children could not acquire agreement on singular verb at stage 5 by adding a ‘s’ to lexical verbs for singular subjects. Instead, there is learner variation according to PT in which the learners produce different linguistic features for subject-verb agreement, namely 3SG-s. There are cases that conventions of L1 (Vietnamese) such as not marking 3rd person singular and plural in verbs may cause the errors in subject verb agreement (3Sg-s) but there are also “induced errors” derived from “overextension” that made the children place the 3rd person singular –s in different words in their utterances. The learners’ “errors” also show their L2 learning strategies and how they build their own grammar on 3SG-s. Classroom observations helps to illustrate which classroom activities are teacher-centered or learner-centered, and if it would better help students to learn and retain the communicative skills in L2 learning. It is also pointed out that the verb ‘be’ is overused in the pattern of 3Sg-s due to the heavy stress of this grammatical structure from the lesson teaching.

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