Grammaticality judgement

The grammaticality judgment test is similar to the one used in Ahlems and etc. research (Ahlem Ammar, Pitsy M. Lightnone and Nina Spada, 2010). The task included 15 questions that were distributed among 20 participants. All questions will contain statements in two forms, (grammatical and ungrammatical) versions of the same question testing the present perfect knowledge of the respondents. Participants were required to choose any one of five options regarding the grammatical correctness of the questions according to their knowledge in each statement. The purpose of this task is to determine the level of Russian students’ knowledge of English in forming present Perfect tense. Appendix 1 includes all questions which were given to in the grammatical judgment task. For example:

Identify the right sentence:

(A) Why cat can’t live in water? (B) Why can’t fish live in water?

(1) Option A is correct only.

(2) Option B is correct only.

(3) Both Options are correct.

(4) Both Options are incorrect.

(5) I don’t know.

Scrambled questions

This instrument was distributed in teams of two students. Each pair of respondents was given eight envelopes each of which contained words on different cards (see Appendix 2). There were four sets of cards comprising of both open ended and closed ended questions. Questions were in the form of Yes/No as well sentences in Past Perfect Tense. Moreover, the font was capitalized in order to evade lending clues regarding the word order. Several extra auxiliary verbs were also incorporated in the envelope. The purpose of the provision was to analyze if students are able to provide questions with more than one auxiliary. Nevertheless, students were informed that there is no need to make use of the all words as provided to them in the envelope to design a question. They were entailed the following process:

1. Make maximum usage of the words in the envelope when designing the questions.
2. Questions must be in past perfect tense.
3. Discuss the answer to those questions in a group study.
4. Put the questions in black and white in a separate sheet of paper.

Interviews

The process of interview was conducted on individual basis. Twenty participants were interviewed for the study. The process took place in four parts. In the first segment, the students were given 2 random sentences from scrambled question task and asked to explain the structure of each sentence. This was followed by the second part of the interview. In this segment, participants were asked to explain grammatical rules used for past perfect. In the final stage, I have selected several questions that were written by the students in the task of scrambled questions. They were then assigned the task to translate those questions into Russian to compare word order with English sentences. The participants were motivated to give response in English but they were told to switch into Russian whenever they needed to, as in Ahlems and etc. research. The purpose was to extract the maximum possible information about their inter language question system and its knowledge and check relationship between their meta-linguistic knowledge and grammar performance.

Chronology

Twenty students completed their grammaticality judgment as well as the scrambled questions. One week later, these twenty individuals were interviewed. The selection was done on random basis.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 1011