DEVELOPMENT OF IM YUNIC FOR SVA LEARNING DEVICE FOR GRAMMATICAL PROFICIENCY

The study developed the IM YUnIC for SVA in response to a desire to offer an interactive, modern-inspired traditional learning device for teaching subject and verb agreement (SVA) among Grade 7 students. Adopting the descriptive research design, data were obtained from the interview with the cooperating teacher, the classroom observation using the device in two randomly chosen Grade 7 sections composed of 76 students of Nicolas L. Galvez Memorial National High School (NLGNHS) in Bay, Laguna, the test, and the survey. Data were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings revealed that, based on the teacher’s assessment and periodical test, the students’ level of grammatical proficiency was “developing” with grammar being taught implicitly using teacher-made materials. With its interactive features to enhance knowledge on subject and verb agreement, IM YUnIC for SVA was developed and presented to teachers and students. It earned positive feedback in terms of its appearance, impact, utility, and content. A ten-item test was then administered, and results showed that students mean scores were 5.51 and 5.05, suggesting that students need more practice. Hence, IM YUnIC for SVA may not easily develop students’ grammatical proficiency, but it can offer potential benefits.&nbsp

The phrasal-prepositional verbs in Philippine English: A corpus-based analysis

The study determines the most common forms of phrasal-prepositional verbs (PPVs) in Philippine English using the ICE-PHI and describes their syntactic and semantic features, following Quirk et al.\u27s (1985) framework. Thirty nine out of the forty-eight words from the list of Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) were found in the corpus using AntConc 3.4. Results show that come up with, get out of, look forward to, come out with, hold on to, and catch up with are the most frequently used PPVs by Filipinos. These PPVs occur in active voice. They are intransitive verbs and are also inseparable. Findings further reveal that the meanings of the PPVs are the same as the single-word verb meanings provided by the online dictionaries of phrasal verbs, and those single-word verb meanings can replace the PPVs. Hence, they are idiomatic. The study implies that Filipinos use minimal number of PPVs. They appear to be conservative in their choice of PPV structure, but generally show proficiency in using PPVs in their utterances. Copyright © 2017 Jennibelle Ella and Shirley Dit

Examining the Morphological Processing of Inflected and Derived words by Students in Grades 7, 8, and 9

© 2019 Asian E F L Journal Press. All rights reserved. Morphological processing of inflected and derived words tends to vary by age as studies have reported that preschool children begin to produce inflected words spontaneously in their speech earlier than derived words (Brown, 1973; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973). Conversely, knowledge of derived forms occurs in late childhood and are continuously learned even beyond adolescence. This study follows Deacon, Campbell, Tamming, and Kirby’s (2010) attempt to establish a direct comparison of relational knowledge of inflected and derived forms through priming method. Specifically, it focuses on ESL children whose native language is Kinaray-a – a language widely spoken in Antique Province in the central part of the Philippines. The experiment involved 90 students from Grades 7, 8, and 9 in a public high school. They were presented four types of priming conditions – root forms, inflected, derived and orthographic control items (e.g., form, formed, forming, and format) then followed by a fragment completion task (e.g., f o _ _). The results showed that the participants were able to complete the fragment with the target word (e.g., form for f o _ _). Analysis of the mean accuracy and priming effect revealed that identity/root form had the highest score and the greatest priming effect was followed by the inflected and the derived forms. Moreover, no statistically significant difference was found between inflectionally and derivationally suffixed words as they are both equally effective in eliciting the target words. Finally, priming effects were greater for the inflected and derived forms than for the orthographic control, and they were also found to be consistent by and across grades

Perceived offensiveness of swear words across genders

Swear words are usually associated with taboo spheres like sex, excretory functions, and religion (Fagersten, 2012). These words are identified as offensive, inappropriate and unacceptable in particular contexts, and those who swear are perceived to be anti-social, untrustworthy and incompetent (Cavazza & Guidetti, 2014). The use of swear words is considered masculine while women, in general, face double scrutiny for using vulgar language that are traditionally spoken by men (Lakoff, 1973). Thus, this study was conducted to determine the offensiveness of swear words as perceived by male and female university students in the Philippines based on the word-list rating task and on the same-gender and mixed-gender hypothetical recorded dialogue interactions. Through the use of survey and interviews, it was found that generally, swear words are inherently offensive and that p-i- is perceived to be the most offensive. In addition, female participants show higher offensiveness ratings as compared to their male counterparts. Thus, the findings support the assertion made by Jay (1992) that females are more offended by swear words as compared to males as this could be brought by the desires of men and women to present themselves that is consistent with the expected behavior for their position in the society. © 2019 Asian E F L Journal Press. All rights reserved