THE EFFECT OF CLASSROOM GAMES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES
Abstract
Abstract. Motivating students to write is a major concern for language teachers. It is observed that the undergraduate students of Engineering tend to ignore this skill. With the growth of technology, the importance assigned to this skill has further weakened. Writing is limited to attempting examination questions, and evaluators assess the answers from the perspective of the acquisition of technical concepts and most often overlook the linguistic incompetence of the student. It is obvious that as second language learners of English, technical students have very little exposure to the English language and specifically to the skill of writing. In an attempt to develop appropriate writing strategies in students, an experiment was conducted in which tasks were designed to serve as a stimulus to generating writing in the classroom. The tasks designed were in the form of games, role-play activities which engaged the learners’ interest and at the same time helped them to relax while learning. This study aims to investigate the syntactic structures the students are capable of producing as a result of introducing such activities and games. Thus, these are analyzed and categorized from Entry level to Exit level of the experiment. The method of analysis of syntactic structures adopted is based on Kellogg Hunt (1969).
Key words: classroom, games, role-play activities, syntactic structures
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