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Enhancing Students’ Understanding Of English Grammar Through Literary Works And Exploring Students’ Voice On Their Use

Paper · 2021 · Asfi Aniuranti, Dinar Faiza and Yasinta Wulandari

Summary

The paper addresses weak grammar mastery among university EFL students. In an Intermediate Grammar class, a pre-test averaged 62.76, which is a C grade. The authors ran a classroom action research study using the Kemmis & McTaggart cycle of planning, acting/observing and reflecting. It lasted one cycle of three meetings with 19 students from the 2018 cohort of the English Language Teaching Department at Universitas Nahdlatul Ulama Purwokerto. Grammar was taught through literary material:

  • a short story
  • an excerpt from a novel
  • a film scene or script

Fantasy and humour were chosen as genres. The authors measured learning with multiple-choice pre- and post-tests. They captured student attitudes with a closed questionnaire covering three areas: effects on the learning process, effects on the learners, and the classroom technology. Before starting, they set the success threshold at a post-test mean of 70, the minimum for a B. The post-test mean reached 70.53, a 12.38% relative gain, which cleared the threshold. Questionnaire answers clustered on agree and strongly agree. The study suggests authentic narrative texts can make grammar instruction more effective and more engaging.

Key points

  • Baseline pre-test mean was 62.76 (C level). Post-test mean was 70.53, a 12.38% improvement. The preset success criterion was 70.
  • Design: classroom action research following Kemmis & McTaggart, with one cycle of three meetings in a single class of 19 students.
  • Materials:
    • the short story Haunted
    • part of the novel The Deplorable Word
    • a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  • Instruments were a multiple-choice grammar test and a closed Likert-type questionnaire, both adapted from earlier studies. Questionnaire data were tallied and converted to percentages.
  • Every questionnaire item drew mostly positive responses (scale 4–5). However, only 42.1% agreed that the LCD, speakers and PowerPoint were useful.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors fixed a concrete pass threshold (mean ≥ 70) before the intervention, so the outcome is judged against a pre-committed bar rather than any upward change.
  • I2. They pair an objective score with a separate self-report instrument, using the second to support the validity of the first rather than relying on one signal.
  • I3. Literary prose and film dialogue are chosen because they display many sentence structures and ways of linking ideas, at varied difficulty levels.
  • I4. Texts are picked using explicit criteria: learner proficiency, text length, cultural load, interest, and fit to the target topic.
  • I5. The plan → act/observe → reflect cycle treats each meeting as a chance to adjust the next one, and the authors suggest extending the number of cycles for better results.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Each training or repair-rule iteration could declare its target score in advance, so that small gains are not rationalised after the fact.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluations could combine task accuracy with an independent check, such as human or LLM-teacher judgements of explanation quality, to catch metric gaming.
  • I3 (tree): Short stories and screenplay dialogue could serve as a stress-test set for the parsers, since they mix narration, direct speech and fragments that news-style treebanks under-represent.
  • I4 (answer): The fable-and-tale QA set could be curated with similar tags (length, cultural background needed, grammatical topic), so test difficulty can be controlled and reported.
  • I5 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could run in explicit short cycles with a reflection step that logs which errors each cycle targeted and whether they were fixed.

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 Nahdlatul Ulama Purwokerto.

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksInformation Systems · 523 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Asfi Aniuranti, Dinar Faiza and Yasinta Wulandari. 2021. Enhancing Students’ Understanding Of English Grammar Through Literary Works And Exploring Students’ Voice On Their Use. Scholaria: Jurnal Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{aniuranti2021enhancing,
  title = {{Enhancing Students’ Understanding Of English Grammar Through Literary Works And Exploring Students’ Voice On Their Use}},
  author = {Asfi Aniuranti, Dinar Faiza and Yasinta Wulandari},
  booktitle = {Scholaria: Jurnal Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan 11},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://ejournal.uksw.edu/scholaria/article/view/5259}
}

References

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