Learning Present Continuous Tense Made Easy through “Son, Mummy and the -ing Cat” Module

Abstract

Learning the grammar, particularly tenses of English language may be difficult or confusing to many second or foreign language learners whose mother tongue does not have a complex grammar system, such as Malay Language. This raises problems in constructing grammatically correct sentences; both in spoken and written work. Hence, there is a need to find means that would be easy and fun to help children learn the grammar of English. This paper presents and discusses a quasi-experimental study that aimed to test the effectiveness of an innovative module developed and named "Son, Mummy and the-ing cat" to aid students in constructing correct present continuous sentences. It integrates elements of storytelling, puppetry, role-play and word cards as an in-class intervention activity. 58 Year Six (age 12) pupils experienced using the module for 13 days and their writing performance was assessed in the pre-and post-tests of their sentence-production. Findings of the paired samples t-test show a difference of means between the two tests. The students constructed more and higher instances of correct present continuous tense sentences after the use of the module. This further implies that learning a concept, although complex and confusing as the English grammar, can be enhanced with creative teaching aids.