Strategies for Better Learning of English Grammar: Chinese vs Thais Part 3

Aye aye, folks! This week I'd still like to discuss my review about the next part of the journal entitled Strategies for Better Learning of English Grammar: Chinese vs Thais.

3. Methodology
3.1. Research Question
There are 4 questions in order to fulfill the research in grammar strategies and need for the context-based approach.

• What strategies do the higher and lower achievement learners apply in their English grammar learning?
• Do the Chinese and the Thai higher achievement learners apply the grammar learning strategies similarly or differently?
• Do the Chinese and the Thai lower achievement learners apply the grammar learning strategies similarly or differently?
• Are there any strategies that typically distinguish Chinese from Thais?

3.2. Subjects
The subject that the researchers chose were 168 grade 11 students: 91 Chinese and 77 Thais. These students then grouped into three competence levels: higher, intermediate and lower. But, the writer only focused on the higher and lower achievers' grammar learning strategies.


3.3. Instruments
There are 2 research instruments that the researchers  used in the methodology, a grammar proficiency test and questionnaire on  grammar learning strategies.
The researchers developed a 60-item grammar proficiency test, in order to classify the subjects into higher, intermediate and lower achievement learners. The test were all about the formation of sentences in English, for example: the use of the noun and the pronoun in the subject, the use of finite verb forms in the predicate, the use of the non-finite verb forms, the use of the modifiers, the use of connectives, and the use of the punctuation marks and capitalization.

And the questionnaire of the research consisted of two parts.

• Part 1: contained the background information of the subjects, e.g. gender and nationality.
• Part 2: contained 30-item grammar learning strategy questionnaire based on Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), divided into  6 parts: the memory category, the cognitive category, the compensation category, the metacognitive category, the affective category and the social category.

The questionnaire itself was translated into Chinese and Thai in order to avoid any misunderstandings and for the result accuracy.

Well, that's all about the methodology that the researchers of the journal used. We'll discuss about the next part of the journal next week.

See ya, people!