IMPROVING YEAR 4 PUPILS’ ABILITY TO SPELL COUNTABLE PLURAL FORMS OF NOUNS THROUGH THE USE OF ‘MAKE IT PLURAL’ (M.I.P) CHART

Amira Shahirah Lokman,Noraini Binti Abdullah Sani

doi:10.21070/picecrs.v1i1.514

Abstract

The lack of understanding and confusion on the basic rules of plural nouns faced by the pupils has greatly affected their ability to write correct spelling of the plural forms of the nouns. A research was conducted on 4 selected participants from Year 4 B of SK Z who obviously showed difficulties in applying appropriate spelling rules to form correct plural forms of the nouns. Hence, this action research was conducted to develop the pupils’ ability to spell the countable plural forms of the nouns correctly. A plural form chart named ‘Make It Plural’ Chart was used as the intervention to address this issue. Four lessons using the intervention with different focused in spelling rules of the plural nouns (‘-s’, ‘-es’, ‘-ies’ ‘-ves’) were implemented throughout this research in order to assist the pupils in improving their ability to spell the countable plural forms of the nouns correctly. The data for this study was collected through observation, the result of worksheets’ scores and the result of the pre-test and post-test. The results of the findings from three different sources showed that the use of ‘Make It Plural’ (M.I.P) Chart has significantly improved the participants’ ability to spell the countable plural forms of the nouns correctly. Discussion of the findings, reflection and suggestion for further research was highlighted in the last section of this article in order to develop more quality and comprehensive teaching and learning session in the future.

Highlights

Realizing the importance of the English language, the Ministry of Education Malaysia has introduced the standardized Primary School Standard Curriculum (KSSR) to boost the English language learning as a means of pushing the younger generation towards being able to compete with the global community in the future ("English language and its importance to Malaysia’s growth", 2012)
Bonn (2016) maintains that noun is the core of a sentence which conveys the meaning of what is being talked about and is viewed as the most prominent subject that makes a sentence works.In conjunction to this statement, the researcher intends to focus on one of the crucial parts in grammatical components which is on countable plural nouns where she found that majority of the learners from her past teaching experiences wereable to understand the function of singular and plural nouns but when it comes to the spelling rules of Amirah Shahirah Lokman and Noraini Abdullah Sani/Proceeding of ICECRS, 1 (2016) 449-458 transforming the singular nouns into the plural nouns, the pupils tend to get confused and spell the word form changes incorrectly
The researcher has carried out four lessons with different focus of the plural rules in each lesson by using the ‘Make It Plural’ (M.I.P) Chart in order to improve on the participants’ ability to spell the plural forms of the nouns correctly

Summary

Introduction

Realizing the importance of the English language, the Ministry of Education Malaysia has introduced the standardized Primary School Standard Curriculum (KSSR) to boost the English language learning as a means of pushing the younger generation towards being able to compete with the global community in the future ("English language and its importance to Malaysia’s growth", 2012). Apart from that, the researcher managed to identify four pupils who had shown repeated errors in spelling the plural forms of the nouns including the rules of adding ‘-s’, ‘-es’ , ‘-ies’ and ‘-ves’ and they scored the lowest marks ranging from 0% – 40% compared to the other classmates This indicated that these pupils required more attention and the researcher had decided to use an intervention named ‘Make It Plural’ (M.I.P) Chart in order to improve the pupils’ ability to spell the countable plural forms of nouns correctly

Methods

Results

Conclusion