‘Are you going to go?’ Putting a pedagogical grammar rule under the corpus spotlight

A rule stating that we tend to avoid using go and come after the future marker going to appears again and again in many coursebooks and grammars used in English Language Teaching, and has done for decades. This article attempts to show, using empirical evidence from corpora, why the rule is inaccurate, and different ways that this might be established. As the rule under consideration is typically framed as a tendency (like many other pedagogical grammar rules), an additional aim of the work is to outline the kinds of corpus analyses researchers and materials designers can potentially use in order to investigate the question of (claimed) linguistic tendencies. The article concludes by discussing why a rule that is apparently inaccurate nevertheless appears again and again in print, arguing that the existence of a well-established and widely-accepted ‘canon’ of ELT grammar means that such inaccuracies in descriptions of grammar can be easily perpetuated

Issues In Explaining Mixed Conditionals To EFL Learners

In introducing conditionals to the students, teachers come across difficulties, as it is hard to explain this grammar rule without mentioning form, meaning, and time-tense relationship separately. Since the conditionals themselves are a complicated topic for both teachers and learners, mixed conditionals raise more confusion among L2 learners in Uzbekistan. Therefore, mixed conditionals are one of the most troublesome issues that EFL learners struggle to understand and use. This article focuses on (1) learners’ difficulties in understanding this grammar rule and (2) easier ways of explaining mixed conditionals to the students with the help of focus-on-form and focus-on-meaning activities.

THE PROBLEM OF DECLENSION FOREIGN ORIGINED WORDS AND ABBREVIATIONS IN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The reflection of intercultural interaction on languages is inevitable. Especially thanks to the advancing technology, many foreign words and terms have entered the lives of societies. As a result, the question has arisen whether these words can be adapted to the grammatical rules of the language in which they are included. There have been different approaches to this issue. In the Russian language, there have been foreign words related to social life, politics and technology in different periods from the past to the present, as well as abbreviations with the problem of declension. The issue of whether these words and abbreviations should be included in the Russian declension system was always an important question. As well as those who argued that the Russian language is a suitable language to include foreign words in the declension system, there were also those who stated the opposite. In order for the adjectives that characterize these words and verbs in the past tense to get the correct gender affix, it is also important to determine their gender to the Russian grammar rule. In this study are given the approaches to the problem of declension of foreign origined words and abbreviations in Russian language. In light of these approaches, non-declining nouns and abbreviations will be listed by considering the genders in which they are included. Keywords: Russian language, declension, foreign origin, abbreviation

Analysis of Omission and Addition Errors Found in the Students’ English Texts

The research was done to find the aspects of omission and addition errors in English texts made by the students of MAN 3 Bantul. The research was a descriptive study which was conducted in MAN 3 Bantul. The data was collected by analyzing the students’ writing. There were 20 exposition texts made by the eleventh-grade students of MAN 3 Bantul. The text is written in four different themes. After getting the data, the data were analyzed by identifying and deeply checking the students’ errors according to the theory form James (1998). The data found then categorized by entering the data to the table based on the linguistic taxonomy and surface strategy taxonomy. There were many aspects of omission or addition errors found in this study. From the data analysis, the study found seven aspects of omission errors and six aspects of addition errors. The aspects of omission errors were omission of (1) to be, (2) article, (3) pluralization, (4) verb, (5) preposition, (6) pronoun, and (7) agreement. While the aspects of addition errors were addition of (1) preposition, (2) article, (3) conjunction, (4) to be, (5) sub clause marker, and (6) verb. It can be concluded that the students still have lack of grammatical mastery and implies that grammar should be inserted in the teaching and learning process. It implies that the students should be given enough opportunity in learning English grammar more. The teacher should also increase their awareness concerning with the errors made by the students. They have to give more emphasize and also feedback to increase the students’ awareness in applying English grammar rule in creating sentence or texts.

Chunking Phrase to Predict Pause Break in Pontianak Malay Language

Pause break is one of the indicators of speech to be easily understood in the Text-to-Speech System. This research aims to improve the accuracy of pause prediction in Pontianak Malay Language Sentences based on earlier research using a chunking phrase. This research is done as one of the efforts to preserve Pontianak Malay Language in order not to become extinct as a local language. Chunking method uses RegexpParser function in Natural Language Toolkit to crop sentences into phrases based on the Part of Speech type. In this research, the authors have developed a new grammar and pause break rule that is different from the earlier research to increase the accuracy of pause prediction. The data used is 500 Pontianak Malay Language sentences that have been recorded by a Pontianak Malay Language native speaker to get the pause break analysis. The pause consists of a short pause (symbolized as “/1) and a long pause (symbolized as “/2”). The tests were a test of pause break compatibility in one sentence and a test using f-measure, recall, and precision parameters. Based on the tests that have been done, the new grammar rule and pause break rule from this research have a better prediction accuracy than the earlier research with the correct predictive value of sentences increasing by 23% from the earlier rule.

When knowing a grammar rule makes L2 users non-native-like

In this work, we investigate the effects of transfer of training in late Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals, compared to natives, in relation to their processing of the English causative-have construction. Two experiments were conducted: one focused on the comprehension of the pattern, and the other focused on its production. The results of both experiments point to the fact that the grammatical rule learned by bilinguals is only 'transferred' when there is time to implement it. In the first experiment, we found no effect of training, on the contrary, bilinguals might have been affected by the SVO distribution of the corresponding construction in their L1. In the second experiment, however, we found that bilinguals had high rates of usage of the canonical causative-have form, SAuxOV. This behavior indicates that bilinguals do not implement the rule automatically. Rather, its implementation is seen in more controlled tasks. Thus, explicitly given grammatical rules seem not to be implicitly learned, as they are not automatized to be easily retrieved in real life usage. Moreover, concerning the causative-have rule, bilinguals' linguistic behavior was more similar to that of natives' when they did not implement the rule and used the SVO form with a causative sense.

Factors Affecting Internship Students’ Speaking Anxiety

This study is sought to discover the English speaking anxiety factors in class of internship students and to investigate the students’ efforts to cope the problems. This research applied qualitative method in addition research subjects were 30 English internship students of Universitas Syiah Kuala in 2015. The data were collected through questionnaire and interview. Both of the instruments were adapted from (Tum Kunt, 2013). The study discovered that the major factors of students’ speaking anxiety divided into two interrelated groups; psychological and educational factors. Regarding to the psychological factors, the students were anxious and feeling fear of having misunderstanding teachers’ instruction and supervision. The educational factors were reflecting to the current bad performance of speaking skill aspects namely; inaccurate of fluency, inappropriate of vocabulary, inappropriate application of grammar rule, insufficient materials preparation and poor of pronunciation. Nevertheless, 16 internship students who were indicated high level of speaking anxiety used various efforts to solve the speaking anxiety such as; practicing, listening to native speaker’s utterance, reading English texts, memorizing words, keeping using English in class, learning grammar rule, making note, preparing the material and using audio dictionary. This study concludes that everyone has anxiety and it is common, yet this problem could be reduced by doing some efforts

Investigating the Relationship between Metalinguistic Knowledge and L2 writing among Intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL Learners

The present study investigates the nature of metalinguistic knowledge among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners, and the relationship between their metalinguistic knowledge and L2 writing in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency. The participants of the present study are a total of 78 intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners. The data collection instruments of the present study include Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), Productive Metalinguistic Knowledge Test (PMKT), Receptive Metalinguistic Knowledge Test (RMKT) (adapted from Ellis, 2009) and opinion essays of a smaller group of the participants. The results revealed that intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners have moderate to high productive and metalinguistic knowledge. They are better at explaining why a L2 sentence is grammatically incorrect than referring to the exact grammar rule and using technical words for the grammatical features. The results also revealed that there is significant moderate correlation between metalinguistic knowledge and writing accuracy.