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STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING NOUN CLAUSES IN
INTERMEDIATE GRAMMAR CLASSROOM
THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fullfilment
of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Pendidikan
Elisse Setya Wardani 112010079
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION PROGRAM
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS
UNIVERSITAS KRISTEN SATYA WACANA
SALATIGA
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STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING NOUN CLAUSES IN INTERMEDIATE GRAMMAR CLASSROOM
A THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fullfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan
Elisse Setya Wardani 112010079
Approved by
Supervisor
Gita Hastuti, M.A.
Examiner
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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in any course or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is made in the text.
Copyright@ 2017. Elisse Setya Wardani and Gita Hastuti, M.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means without the permission of a least one of the copyright owners or the English Language Education Program, Faculty of Language and Arts, Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Salatiga.
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TABLE OF CONTENT
Cover ... i
Approval Page ... ii
Publication Agreement Declaration ... iii
Copyright Statement ... iv
Table of Content ... v
Abstract ... 1
Introduction ... 2
Literature Review ... 3
Noun Clause ... 4
Learners’ Possi le Diffi ulties in Learning Noun Clause ... 5
Strategies in Learning Grammar ... 6
Approaches in Grammar Teaching ... 7
Review of Previous Studies on Noun Clause Learning ... 8
The Study ... 9
Context of the Study ... 10
Participants of the Study ... 11
Instruments of Data Collection ... 12
Data Collection Procedure ... 13
Procedure of Data Analysis... 14
Finding and Discussion ... 15
Conclusion ... 16
Acknowledgement ... 17
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STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING NOUN CLAUSES IN
INTERMEDIATE GRAMMAR CLASSROOM
students‟ difficulties in learning noun clauses and the ways they handle their difficulties.
The participants were 23 students of Intermediate Grammar Class in the year of 2017. The data was collected using a Focus Group Discussion. The results revealed that there were three major difficulties faced by the students in learning noun clause. They were difficulty in identifying functions, creating noun clause, and identifying the subject and verb of a noun clause. Besides, there were three ways students did to overcome their difficulties in learning. They were reviewing materials, asking peers, and finding information and doing exercise in the Internet.
Keywords: learning strategies, EFL learning difficulty, noun clause.
Introduction
In the area of foreign language teaching, grammar is often portrayed as the most unattractive and threatening. Baron (1982 in Al-Mekhlafi & Nagaratnam, 2011) argued that grammar causes the students‟ discomfort. The fact that grammar is difficult for most L2 learners seems unavoidable. Therefore, the discussion about how to teach grammar has grown so large to overcome this matter.
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production and perception of the target language. Memorization deals with the acquisition of the language. Meanwhile, drilling deals with the speech patterns.
However, some teachers like to provide their students with educational tools, like scripted dialogues, language learning tapes, and the Internet as they are commonly used in foreign language classrooms. The students can use the tools while enjoying the grammar learning process. As described by Can (2009), learners are given the chance to work together and collaborate while learning the language by creating their own designs and projects using educational tools such as online learning materials.
Despite the fact that there are many strategies used to teach grammar, students might have their own expectations in their grammar learning process. As mentioned by Borg (1999, in Al-Mekhlafi & Nagaratnam, 2011), student expectations of explicit grammar teaching have been confirmed by many teachers. Borg‟s also mentioned that according to the teachers, explicit grammar teaching is favored by students because of expectation and feelings of insecurity. They often believe that having intellectual knowledge of grammar and its rules by explicit grammar teaching will enable them to use the language and minimize their error eventually. Yet, many students tend to be afraid of making mistakes in grammar. Thus, it caused them to feel insecure that might lead them to face difficulties in their learning development.
Students‟ language skills are to some extent developed by their teachers who are
their first instructor in modeling grammar rules and language patterns in the target
language. Hence, teacher‟s teaching strategies play a major role in the process of
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learning noun clauses in Intermediate Grammar classroom. The aim of the study was to
find out the students‟ difficulties in learning noun clauses and the ways they handle their
difficulties. It was done in the English Language Education Program of Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Salatiga. The study was guided by the following research
questions: “What are the students‟ difficulties in learning noun clauses in Intermediate
Grammar classroom?” and “How do the students handle their difficulties in learning noun
clauses?”
This study hopes to establish a significant reference for English teachers in the area of grammar teaching. It will hopefully be beneficial to the teachers to evaluate their performance and to promote a better teaching strategy of grammar.
Literature Review
Noun Clause
Noun clause is a crucial construction in English that can be a problematic for EFL students because it has various functions (Khudayer, 2013). Noun clauses come in a variety of forms. According to Khudhayer (2013) a noun clause is a dependent clause, which can work like a noun. It consists of a subject and a verb.
4 Difficulties in Learning Grammar
In DeKeyser‟s research (2005), he identified three areas of difficulty for
learners in learning grammar. The first difficulty is complexity of meaning. It arises form language features of the target language which is not exist in their L1. It can include articles, grammatical gender, and classifiers. The second difficulty is the complexity of form. It arises from aspects of the target language which is highly complex and require a number of correct allomorphs and morpheme choices that have to be made and to be in the right syntactic place in a sentence. The last difficulty is the complexity of form-meaning relationship. It occurs when the link between form and meaning are not transparent.
Learners’ Possible Difficulties in Learning Noun Clause
In the process of learning a foreign language, students will find different language patterns from their mother tongue. This condition could lead students to encounter some difficulties that might also be found in the process of learning noun clause. The study of Baithy (2014) found that most of the first graders of a senior high school in Indonesia faced difficulty in using the subordinators properly when learning reported speech that includes noun clause. Baithy 2014) also found that students faced difficulty in understanding the noun clause rules.
Another study done by Khudayer (2013) to 60 Iraqi learners in an EFL university found two areas of difficulties that students encounter in using noun clause in English. First, 56.1% of the total learners faced difficulty in using noun clause at the recognition level due to the faulty comprehension of a distinction in the foreign language. In this
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whether they are finite or nonfinite, and show the functions of these noun clauses in the sentences. Second, 75.3% of the total learners faced difficulty in using noun clause at the
production level in which the learners‟ task is to give ten examples based on what is
required from them. It happened due to a number of causes. The first one is because overgeneralization in which learners failed to use a correct application of the learned material to the actual context. The second is because ignorance of restrictions in which the learners apply some rules to a category to which it is not applicable. The last is because of incomplete applications of rules.
Based on the studies, it can be concluded that possible difficulties faced by learners in learning noun clauses are varied. Learners might find difficulties in understanding the noun clause rules, recognizing noun clauses, identifying the type of noun clauses (finite / non finite) and its functions, and producing sentences with noun clauses properly.
Strategies in Learning Grammar
Wenden and Rubin as cited in Yalcin (2005) defined learning strategies as “any set of operations, steps, plans routines used by the learner to facilitate the obtaining,
storage, retrieved, and usage of information”. Yalcin (2005) listed two kinds of learning
strategies: direct and indirect strategies.
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learning. The third is compensation strategies, which are helpful to the use of new language for comprehension or production.
Meanwhile, indirect strategies can be divided into metacognitive, affective, and social strategies. Metacognitive strategies are used to oversee, regulate, or self-direct language learning. Affective strategies deal with lowering anxiety, self-encouragement, and taking emotional temperature; while social strategies deal with communications between and among people such as asking questions, cooperating with others, and empathizing with others.
Gurata (2008) said that all learners use particular strategies in order to promote their learning. Several researchers have also investigated the learning strategies that help in grammar learning. The study conducted by Gimeno (2002 as cited in Gurata, 2008) indicated that the use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies to teach grammar points improve the experimental group more than the control group did.
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Naturally, students will try to find out how to be a better learner. They will also think about their progresses in learning. Different students might apply different strategies depending on what they need in their learning objectives.
Review of Previous Studies on Noun Clause Learning
A study done by Lee (n.d.) used a questionnaire on 216 Taiwanese students to test
students‟ understanding of three major English clauses (Adjective Clause, Adverbial
Clause, and Noun Clause). The study was conducted in Taiwan. The participants were 80 Science College students, 90 Management College students, 43 Design College students, and 3 Humanity College students. The study found that 50% of the students admitted that they did not understand the meaning and functions of the three major clauses of English, 63% of them admitted that these clauses were very difficult to be learned, and 15% of them said that they did not understand about the clauses at all. Half of the total students are not sure about how to use the three major English clauses even though they had already learned about it for many years.
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that 85.86% learners are successful in recognizing the movement in cases when the noun clause included auxiliary (such as to be, do, and modal), while 74.83% of them encounter difficulties when it did not contain auxiliary.
Based on the literature review and previous studies, it can be concluded that learning Noun Clause is not easy for EFL learners. The difficulties are varied, such as understanding the meaning and function, identifying particular structures in noun clause, understanding the noun clause rules, recognizing noun clauses, and producing sentences with noun clauses properly. Regarding to the possible difficulties EFL students might encounter in learning noun clause, it is interesting to conduct a further study toward this issue. The investigation is needed not only to know about the kind of difficulties in learning, but also to know how the students find their own way to handle their learning problems.
The Study
Context of the Study
The writer conducted the study at the Faculty of Language and Arts of Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana. It is located in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia. In this study, the writer conducted the study in the English Language Education Program, because grammar teaching is very crucial for these students since they are prepared to be English teachers.
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the level of sentences and short texts, and noun clause is one of the grammatical items discussed.
Participants of the Study
The participants of the study were the students of Intermediate Grammar Course in Semester 1 of the 2016/2017 academic year. There were 23 students attending the Intermediate Grammar class at that time, and all of them became the participants of this study.
Instruments of Data Collection
The writer used the following questions as the instrument to collect the data for this study:
1.What do you think of Noun Clause?
2.Do you have difficulties in learning Noun Clause? What are they?
3.Have you tried to handle these difficulties? How? Did it work?
Data Collection Procedure
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after an Intermediate Grammar class on March 13, 2017. The writer recorded the discussions using an audio recorder.
Procedure of Data Analysis
The recorded discussions were transcribed. Then, the transcription data was categorized based on the themes the writer created. The themes were created based on the
research questions: Students‟ Difficulties in Learning Noun Clauses and Students‟ Ways
to Handle Their Learning Problems. The data was presented descriptively in the findings and discussion section based on each theme. Some excerpts from the FGD results will be presented in English to function as evidence of the findings.
Findings and Discussion
In this section, the writer presents the findings and discussion of this study in
attempt to answer the research questions of students‟ difficulties in learning noun clauses
in the Intermediate Grammar course. The study found that there were three kinds of difficulties faced by the students in learning noun clauses and there were three ways students did to overcome their difficulties in learning. In this section, the findings and discussion is divided into two categories. The first category is „Students‟ Difficulties in
Learning Noun Clauses‟ and the second category is „Students‟ Ways to Handle Their
Learning Problems‟. Based on the first FGD‟s question, all the 23 students said that
11 Students’ Difficulties in Learning Noun Clauses
The study found that there were three kinds of students‟ difficulties in learning
noun clause. First, the study found that the different functions of noun clause made the
students confused in identifying the clause‟s functions. There are 17 out of 23 students
who said that. Often the lecturer had the students identify the function of a noun clause and these students often failed the task. Megginson (1996 in Kudhayer, 2013) divided the functions of noun clause into seven types. They are noun clause as a subject, direct object, indirect object, subject complement, object complement, object of preposition, and appositive. The excerpt of the discussion is as follows:
Excerpt 1
I‟m still confused when I have to identify a certain function of a noun clause.
There are so many types and it is confusing to understand each type. (Participant 3)
Excerpt 2
If I should determine a function of a noun clause I often make mistakes because there are too many functions of noun clause and it is not easy to be learned. (Participant 16)
Excerpt 3
The most difficult part for me when learning noun clause is to find the functions. This is because one noun clause can have different function. (Participant 20)
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The second difficulty found in this study is to create a noun clause individually. There are 7 out of total 23 students who claimed that it is hard for them to create a noun clause that states a particular function while they are not able yet to identify the function correctly. The following is the excerpt from the discussion:
Excerpt 4
The most difficult is when I have to make a noun clause but I still find difficulty in understanding each type of noun clause. (Participant 8)
As can be seen on the excerpt, it is logical for the learners if they found difficulty to create a noun clause when they themselves still did not acquire the rules of each function. Thus, it could lead students to making mistakes in producing expressions with a noun clause. Difficulty in producing expressions with noun clauses was also faced by the participants in Khudayer‟s study (2013).
Third, there were 6 out of the total 23 students who stated that they faced difficulties in identifying the subject and verb when learning noun clauses. The following extract is the proof from the discussion:
Excerpt 5
It is difficult for me to determine the subject and the verb of a noun clause. It makes me confused everytime I do an exercise about it. (Participant 2)
Excerpt 6
It‟s hard for me to determine the subject and the verb, because I‟m still not able
enough to understand noun clause. (Participant 13)
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students were not capable enough to understand the learned material. It is similar to
Khudayer‟s study result (2013), in which students faced difficulty in the recognition level
because of faulty comprehension in the foreign language. In other words, students might fail in the recognition level because they lack understanding on the respective principles.
Based on the result, it can be summarized that students faced a number of difficulties when learning noun clauses. The difficulties were identifying the clause‟s functions, producing a noun clause individually, and identifying the subject and verb. It can also be concluded from the excerpts that the three difficulties appeared because almost all the participants are not capable yet in acquiring the rules.
Students’ Ways to Handle Their Learning Problems
In every learning process there must be obstacles faced by students. Yet, students must always have their own solutions to overcome the problems. This study found that
there are three ways of students‟ effort to handle their problems in learning noun clause.
The first way students did to handle the learning problem is reviewing the material. There are 13 out of 23 students who argued that reviewing the materials from their textbook did help them in their learning. The discussion excerpt is as follows:
Excerpt 7
I usually review the material to help me get a better understanding about noun clause. (Participant 9)
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material can be included into direct strategies in which categorized as memory strategies. As Yalcin (2005) stated that memory strategies allowed learners to create mental linkages, apply images and sound, review well, and employing actions. Therefore, reviewing material can be included into a memory strategy.
The second one is asking peers. Eleven out of 23 students stated that they handled their learning problem by asking their peers. Below is the excerpt from the discussion:
Excerpt 8
I‟m not comfortable enough to ask my lecturer, so I ask my friend to make it
clearer when I don‟t understand the material.(Participant 10)
Asking peers can be included into indirect strategy that is categorized as social strategy. Yalcin (2005) stated that social strategies deals with communications between and among people such as asking questions, cooperating with others, and empathizing with others. Hence, asking peers in which contains communication with people is a part of social strategies.
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Beside reviewing the materials from my handout, I usually find materials and exercise in the Internet. It provides various definitions and examples, and also there are answer key for the exercise. So, I know in which part I make mistake. (Participant 5)
The way students handle their learning difficulties by finding materials and doing exercises on the Internet can be included into direct strategies, which is categorized as cognitive strategies. Yalcin (2005) mentioned that cognitive strategies deal with operating directly on incoming information and manipulating it in ways that enhance learning. Therefore, the activity when students read materials and doing exercise in the Internet is a part of operating information to enhance learning.
It can be seen from the results that students did three strategies to handle their difficulties in learning noun clauses. The first one is memory strategies, which were done by reviewing the materials. The second one is social strategies, which were done by asking peers. The last strategy is cognitive strategies, which were done by finding materials and doing exercises on the Internet.
Conclusion
The results revealed that there were three kinds of difficulties faced by the students in learning noun clauses and there were three ways students did to overcome their difficulties in learning.
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correctly. Third, students claimed that identifying the subject and verb when learning noun clauses is difficult due to each different function.
In order to overcome each difficulty in learning, the students tried to find a way to improve and make a better learning. First, students do a material review from their textbook to help them in learning noun clause. Second, they asked their peers when they did not understand the materials. Third, they tried to find information and do exercise in the Internet that could enrich their knowledge to gain better understanding in learning noun clause functions. Here, the study revealed that students used memory, social, and cognitive strategies to handle their difficulties in learning noun clause.
In the findings, there is still something worth noticing in it. Almost all of the students claimed that learning Noun Clause is difficult and confusing. Therefore, it would
be much better if teachers could identify the students‟ difficulties in learning before
delivering the material. Thus, teachers would be able to implement the appropriate approaches in their grammar teaching in the future, such as implementing explicit grammar teaching to help students gain a better understanding about the rules when
learning in class. Meanwhile, it is on the students‟ side to determine what kind of
learning strategy they would use to learn the material outside the class. In this case, teachers could give suggestions to the students about what kind of strategy is better to be done for their at-home-learning when they deal with noun clauses.
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may result differently. In this case, the findings of this research, then, cannot be generalized in all contexts.
Furthermore, it is suggested for other researchers who desire to conduct such similar research to broaden the scope of the research. It would be interesting to investigate deeper about difficulties in learning noun clause with different subject, such as comparing two different groups of participants based on their level or age. At last, the writer hopes that this research could be a reference and consideration for those who work in the area of grammar teaching.
Acknowledgement
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