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Developing English Grammar Instructional Materials Oriented to Constructivism Theory

Paper · 2023 · Andika Andika, Tahrun Tahrun and Masagus Firdaus

Summary

The authors address weak English grammar teaching in a first-semester Grammar 1 course at PGRI University of Palembang. Their needs analysis found that students often arrived unprepared, lectures skipped warm-up and closing activities, and learners stayed unmotivated. Following an R&D approach based on the DDR (Design and Development Research) model, they ran three phases: analysis, design and development. Interviews with the course lecturer and recent students came first. A questionnaire to first- and third-semester students then shaped a printed module grounded in constructivism, the view that learners build new understanding on what they already know. The module covers seven syllabus themes. Each unit has objectives, instructions, explanations, exercises, a comprehension test and a conclusion, and answer keys and references sit at the back. Two experts, one practitioner and students rated it on content, presentation, language and graphics, with mostly "very good" scores. The study matters as a worked example of building teaching material from a needs analysis and then checking it with several kinds of reviewers.

Key points

  • Method: DDR model with interviews, questionnaires and expert review. Participants were first-semester students, third-semester students and the Grammar 1 lecturer.
  • The module's seven themes span parts of speech; the verbs do, be and have; verb tense forms; modal verbs; question words; comparative and superlative degrees; and elliptical sentences in both positive and negative form.
  • The layout is A4 portrait in Times New Roman 12 with 1.5 spacing, a single column and a brightly coloured illustrated cover.
  • Validation used four aspects (content, presentation, language, graphics):
    • Expert 1 rated content and graphics "very good" and the other two aspects "good".
    • Expert 2 and the practitioner rated language "good" and everything else "very good".
    • Students rated all four aspects "very good".
  • Both experts said prior-knowledge activation was not explicit enough. Expert 2 also flagged grammar and punctuation slips, inconsistent APA citations, and too few active tasks such as writing or poster making.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The needs analysis is organised into input, process, output and outcome, which separates missing resources, weak teaching steps, poor results and low motivation instead of treating failure as one lump.
  • I2. Validation is split by reviewer type (domain experts, practitioner, end users) and by separate quality aspects rather than reduced to one overall score, which exposed disagreements such as students rating language higher than the experts did.
  • I3. The experts' main critique is that learners should first show what they already know before new material is added, because constructivist learning hinges on linking new facts to existing ones.
  • I4. Each unit is self-contained, with objectives, exercises, a formative test and an answer key, so a learner can study and check themselves alone.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Error reports from evaluation runs could be sorted the same way, by bad input text, a faulty pipeline step, a wrong answer, or a downstream effect, so each fix targets the right stage.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation could report separate axes, such as parse accuracy, frame correctness and explanation readability, judged by different checkers, so a high score on one axis cannot hide weakness on another.
  • I3 (world): When reading a new text, the world builder could first look up which entities and relations already exist in the knowledge graph and record which facts are new, which confirm, and which conflict.
  • I4 (answer): The seven grammar themes, especially elliptical sentences and comparatives, could become small self-checking test units with answer keys for the school-course readers, making grammar-specific regressions easy to spot.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Universitas PGRI Palembang.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 worksEducation · 203 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Andika Andika, Tahrun Tahrun and Masagus Firdaus. 2023. Developing English Grammar Instructional Materials Oriented to Constructivism Theory. Journal of Languages and Language Teaching 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.33394/jollt.v11i2.6838

@article{andika2023developing,
  title = {{Developing English Grammar Instructional Materials Oriented to Constructivism Theory}},
  author = {Andika Andika, Tahrun Tahrun and Masagus Firdaus},
  journal = {Journal of Languages and Language Teaching 11},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.33394/jollt.v11i2.6838},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v11i2.6838}
}

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