Grammar Terms Classifications in an English Classroom for Future Engineers

Abstract

To support the development of grammar and intercultural academic literacy skills in a collegiate EFL classroom, a curricular intervention was designed and implemented. This was necessitated by the situation when FL instruction hours are being gradually cut down, while students’ communicative competences, in both the target and native languages, are often not up to the level expected from students entering a university. Drawing on a sociocultural semiotic perspective on ecology of language learning and teaching [1], innovative multimodal instructional materials were designed and introduced as bilingual taxonomies of linguistic terminology. Finalized by students, these materials were regularly used in class for at least a semester to raise English grammar awareness and promote terms’ acquisition, while supporting emerging metalinguistic skills and intercultural academic literacies. To find out if the undertaken intervention was bringing about the intended learning, an action research was initiated. The article describes the intervention and reports on the first stage of the research, a preliminary experiment that was administered as a terminology test to two groups of students. The experimental group included students who had regularly worked with the taxonomies, while the control group students had not been subjected to the intervention. The obtained test results indicate that the treatment group demonstrated a better performance on various tasks designed to check students’ knowledge of grammar terms and application of metalinguistic skills. Some directions for continuing the undertaken research at the next stage are considered.