The purpose of this study is to examine and propose improvement plans by examining how the grammar learner's prior knowledge of morpheme, words and word class is handled in textbooks. In terms of constructivism, learning is a process in which learners...
The purpose of this study is to examine and propose improvement plans by examining how the grammar learner's prior knowledge of morpheme, words and word class is handled in textbooks. In terms of constructivism, learning is a process in which learners organize their own meanings, and various factors in the learning context affect the composition of the meaning. For this reason, it is important to teachers to understand contents that are difficult for learners.
Therefore, this study developed a questionnaire and analyzed the responses to the students in order to understand their grammar prior knowledge. The questions in the questionnaire were organized by categorizing the questions on the question and answer boards of the EBS Grammar class. The questions are composed subjective and objective questions. The results of the analysis of the questionnaire responses are summarized as follows.
First, students were less confused when differences in usage or meaning were revealed explicitly. Free nouns, postpositional particles, etc. can easily analyze but can not analyze the grammatical morpheme. Second, they do not know the concept accurately, and when a similar term is presented, they look confused. Such cases include confusion between the roots and the stem, the affix and the ending, or inability to distinguish between the case-marking postpositional particle and the auxiliary postpositional particle, the numeral and the numeral determiner. Third, there was a pattern of confusion even in cases of similar use. Learners could not distinguish between verbs and adjectives, predicate and conjugations of predicate that have similar uses in the sentence.
Based on this analysis, this study examined how knowledge of the grammar is being stated in textbooks and suggested improvement plans. The problems identified in the chapters of ' word formation ' and ' word class' in the textbook are as follows. First, explanations are missing or lacking and there are insufficient examples. Maybe there are differences in detail because of each textbook's authors, but if the contents were missing despite the need for explanation, there were not enough kinds of examples. Second, the learning activities are not diverse. For the most part, there were activities presented such as identifying the concepts just learned, or organizing them through additional materials.
In order to modify these problems, improvement plans are proposed as follows. First, a description of the content and sufficient examples should be added. In particular, the difficulty for learners identified through the analysis of questionnaires was mainly that they did not have sufficient explanations or examples. Therefore, a sufficient explanation of the grammar content and appropriate and diverse examples should be given. Second, it is important to add a learner-centric learning activity. Learning activities should be presented that allow learners to build their own concepts from simply checking the learning content. Third, it is necessary to arrange content considering the learning sequence of the learner. In particular, it is very important to determine the order of learning, since prior knowledge greatly affects grammar learning. Therefore, considering the content connection and hierarchy, the most effective order must be considered.
This study is meaningful in that the average learner identified difficult grammar prior knowledge and expanded the scope to review textbooks and present suggestions for improvement. In the future, research is expected to be conducted on other grammatical categories or on more learners. It is also hoped that the process of identifying learners' knowledge of grammar and reviewing textbooks will be used in writing new textbooks and preparing for classes at school sites for student' effective learning.