An Action Research on Improving the Ability of Using Pre-nominal Possessives in ESL Writing among Grade Seven Students at a Government School

Abstract

Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) is a huge and responsible task which requires a significant degree of experiment on the part of the ESL teacher. Over the years, second language educators have digressed from form-focused methods such as the Grammar Translation Method (GTM) and the Audiolingual Method (AM) to meaningfocused methods such as Community Language Teaching (CLT) and Community Language Learning (CLL). Learning grammar structures of a second language, especially English, is naturally challenging for learners as the syntactic patterns can be significantly different from their native languages. This study investigated the use of one such grammatical structure which is prenominal possessives among a group of grade 7 students at a government school in Colombo. The study was conducted as an action research with the primary objective of improving the ability to use pre-nominal possessive forms accurately in the writing of the grade 7 students. During the first few weeks of teaching, the researcher observed several recurrent errors in their use of prenominal possessive forms such as the apostrophe. A pre-test was administered to confirm the errors and subsequently, the intervention was implemented. Thereafter, the post-test was administered. An improvement in the accuracy level of using prenominal possessives was evident after analyzing the responses of the pretest and the post-test. In conclusion, avenues for further improvements were suggested.