Grammatical Ability Assessment Software for ESL Students with Limited English Proficiency

Abstract

The birth of the K to 12 curriculum in the Philippine education system adds the inclusion of English as core subjects in Senior High School. However, these English subjects redirect their focus away from the extensive teaching of grammar. Despite recent trends on the teaching of English in the communicative approach, various literatures agree that grammar is still the foundation of a second language acquisition. In order to determine the specific contents of a remediation program among the limited English SHS students of the locale, a grammatical ability assessment software is developed. Subscribing to the concept of weighted average, students’ frequency of errors in the different word classes serve as the basis for the assignment of weight transmutation used in the automated computation features of the software. Among the elected 100 limited English students of Lyceum of Alabang Inc., it is found out that their common mistakes are on verbs followed by adverbs. In average, the students also find difficulties in noun, adjective, preposition, and conjunction usages. Their least common errors are pronouns. The values assigned in the automated checking, recording, and reporting features of the software are based from these results. These inputs direct the development of the software. Later on, bugs and other software issues are fixed and finalized. After the software’s development, it is presented to the English faculty members of the locale the students as users to-be, and IT specialists, who then provided their evaluation. Results show that the software exhibits a highly satisfactory mean score with suggestions focusing on the adaptability of the software to mobile devices. Likewise, the results on the students’ taxonomy of errors in grammar manifest the recommendations for the content of remediation programs in English.