A Cloze-styled Textual Enhancement Targeting Prepositions

Michael Steven Heinz

Abstract


<p >Even at the highest level of bilingual competency for Korean learners of English, prepositions remain a significant challenge. Based on the classroom observation that incidental learning was not significantly improving proficiency with prepositions amongst a group of graduate school interpretation majors, a classroom exercise was executed as form of intervention. The participants in this study demonstrated very high proficiency in both English and Korean although all consider Korean to be their mother tongue. The exercise involved giving ten texts with Cloze-styled textual enhancements to 33 students to determine if their proficiency with prepositions could be improved. Students were given a pretest and a post-test before and after the assignments respectively. The results were promising showing an average increase of 5.7% from pretest to post-test. Additional examination of the data showed that students of lower proficiency on average saw a 9.6% increase in scores. Qualitative feedback from students confirmed positive educational experiences and strongly supported the idea that incidental learning is insufficient. Further study is recommended based on the findings in this study.

https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.16.10.2


Keywords


Cloze, Text Enhancement, Incidental Learning, EFL, SLA

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References


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