Effectiveness of English Preposition Learning through Data-Driven Learning (DDL)

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of paper-based data-driven learning (DDL) method in developing young Thai students in learning three English prepositions, which are ‘during’, ‘among’ and ‘between’, and to examine the attitudes of the participants towards learning through the DDL activities. The convenience-sampled participants were 30 Thai grade 4 students who have A2 CEFR level, studying in a private school in Nakhonsawan province, Thailand. They were taught the target preposition using DDL for 6 weeks. In order to analyse the data, the mean scores of pre-test and post-test were compared by using paired-samples t-test. The tests consist of gap-filling, grammaticality judgement test and sentence building. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in their mean scores (p < 0.001), which increased from the pre-test to the post-test after DDL activities were introduced to the students. According to the test results, it was found that the participants could develop their grammatical consciousness and produce more meaningful and grammatical sentences with a variety of complexity. Moreover, the questionnaire and interview responses revealed the positive attitudes of the participants towards learning through the DDL method as they found it fun, interesting and challenging, and they considered this method as a helpful resource for learning new grammatical knowledge. Thus, this study yields an instructive result that DDL can be applied with young EFL learners and could be an encouraging teaching method for EFL/ESL teachers. Keywords: data-driven learning (DDL); English preposition teaching; young Thai EFL students; Corpus linguistics; paper-based