Construction of English Grammar Syllabus: Focus On the Construction of Simple Sentences

The ability to produce and understand sentences is prerequisite to learning but many Malaysian students face serious problem in producing and understanding them. In this study, the knowledge and skills of simple sentence construction among 600 rural/urban students were investigated; observation a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: IBRAHIM, ADBUL HALIM, HJ ABU, ABDUL GHANI
Format: Monograph
Published: Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris 2009
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Online Access:http://pustaka2.upsi.edu.my/eprints/444/
http://pustaka2.upsi.edu.my/eprints/444/1/CONSTRUCTION%20OF%20ENGLISH%20GRAMMAR%20SYLLABUS-FOCUS%20ON%20THE%20CONSTRUCTION%20OF%20SIMPLE%20SENTENCES.pdf
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Summary:The ability to produce and understand sentences is prerequisite to learning but many Malaysian students face serious problem in producing and understanding them. In this study, the knowledge and skills of simple sentence construction among 600 rural/urban students were investigated; observation and interviews with their teachers were carried out to investigate whether teachers taught sentence building. The students were asked to translate 80 Bahasa Melayu sentences into English. Their sentences were analyzed for accuracy and errors based on 8 different sentence patterns and different forms such as questions and passive. The results show that students' ability to construct sentences was very poor. The easiest sentence pattern was NP + be + NP and the most difficult pattern was NP + VP in the perfect. Their skills in forming all question forms were poor especially in using correct auxiliaries. The poor ability to construct simple sentences was evident due to the negligence of teachers in teaching the skills.