Teaching Indefinite Articles in English Using Hindi Speech Sounds: A Classroom Action Research

Disha Esther Ramtek

doi:10.24113/ijellh.v9i6.11092

Abstract

This paper focuses on teaching the use of indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ appropriately to the students who have had their schooling from Hindi medium schools and are presently pursuing bachelor and diploma courses. It was seen that these students fail to use correct indefinite articles before English words because of the lack of knowledge of consonant and vowel sounds in English language, further to solve this issue a technique was introduced to the students where they could use their prior knowledge of sounds associated to Hindi letters of alphabet. Classroom action research was performed for the fulfillment of the purpose of this research.

Highlights

Can you write a letter?Classroom Action Research was used to find out if the technique of using prior knowledge of sounds of Hindi letters of alphabet to find out if the English words are truly beginning with consonant or vowel sound and further using appropriate indefinite article where needed
Articles play a very important role in ensuring that we speak and write correct English
Use of some articles depends strictly on the sound produced by them (Dhillon et al 66).While teaching ‘articles’ to college students who have completed their schooling from Hindi medium schools, have Hindi as their mother tongue and had less or no proper English e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406

Summary

Can you write a letter?

Classroom Action Research was used to find out if the technique of using prior knowledge of sounds of Hindi letters of alphabet to find out if the English words are truly beginning with consonant or vowel sound and further using appropriate indefinite article where needed. Students of both the classes enthusiastically applied the technique of using prior knowledge of Hindi vowels (स्वर)and consonants(व्यंजन)to use appropriate indefinite articles before English words. They carefully read the given questions one-by-one, loudly pronouncing English words succeeding the blanks to find out what sound is being produced by the first letter of the given English word and trying to connect to the letter of Hindi alphabet that produces similar sound.

You will X-ray eks-rey

Findings

Conclusion