Effectiveness of “Silent Way Approach”: In The Case of Simple Present Tense

A Study

Presented to

Mrs. Shielanie S. Dacumus

University of Rizal System

Morong, Rizal

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Subject

English Teaching Methodology

Submitted by:

John Melbert C. Lirio

2019
 Introduction

According to corpus research, in academic writing, the three tenses used the

most often are the simple present, the simple past, and the present perfect. The next

most common tense is the future; some major assessments, course assignments, and

the doctoral study proposal at Walden are written in this tense for a study that will be

conducted in the future.

The biggest problem for some learners seems to be the fact that native speakers

do not always use the past perfect when learners have been told they must. Even

teachers who are native speakers do not always agree on whether the past perfect is

more appropriate than the past simple in some sentences (2011, Je Web). Familiarity

about what tense should be used in different context, students often misuse the tenses

of verb.

There are a lot of methods to use when teaching grammar to the students, but

the thing is what would be effective. According to (Shore, 2001) Students with English

as a second language (ESL) constitute a significant percentage of the population of our

nation's schools. This population continues to increase more rapidly than that of native

English-speaking students. The language minority population has a high dropout rate.

These students are also among the lowest ranking in academic achievement and

expectations. They represent an at-risk population faced with a wide range of

challenges stated by (Thompson, 2000). Choosing a method to use for the student is

crucial especially in teaching grammar.

Theoretical Background

Asiri conducted a research about the grammatical problems related to simple

tenses and the results of this research generally showed that the percentage of

students‟ problems related to simple tenses was 66%. Related to nominal form in

simple present tense, the problem was 11.7% errors in using of verb-be. Besides, in

verbal form, there was 90% errors related to the verb form and 100% errors related to

the use of auxiliary ‘do’ and ‘does’. Furthermore, the percentage of students‟ problems

at nominal form in simple past tense was in the use of verb-be. The result was 75.5%

errors. In addition, in verbal form, the percentage was 93% errors related to the verb

form. Besides, related to nominal form in simple future tense, the percentage of

students‟ problems was 56.7%. The errors were related to the use of auxiliary ‘be going

to/will+be’. Then, in verbal form, the percentage of students‟ problems was 74.1%. It

was related to the use of auxiliary ‘be going to’ and ‘will’. The research shown that there

is a need to explore different teaching method to find out what are the effective

approach in teaching simple tenses.

Review of Related Literature

Verb phrases (VPs) situate the event to which they refer in a particular time, and

express its level of factuality along with the speaker’s perception of it (Aarts, 2011)

These tense aspect-modality (TAM) characteristics are encoded quite differently across

languages. For instance, when translating VPs into a morphologically rich language

from a less rich one, mismatches of the TAM categories arise. The difficulties of
generating highly inflected Romance VPs from English ones have been noted for

languages such as Spanish (Vilar et al., 2006) and Brazilian Portuguese (Silva, 2010).

Research in statistical MT (SMT) only recently started to consider such verb

tense divergences as a translation problem. For EN/ZH translation, given that tense is

not morphologically marked in Chinese, Gong et al. (2012) built an n-gram-like

sequence model that passes information from previously translated main verbs onto the

next verb, with overall quality improvements o f up to 0.8 BLEU points. Ye et al. (2007)

used a classifier to insert appropriate Chinese aspect markers which could also be used

for EN/ZH translation.

Gojun and Fraser (2012) trained a phrase-based SMT system using POS-tags as

disambiguation labels concatenated to English words which corresponded to the same

German verb. This system gained up to 0.09 BLEU points over a system without the

POS-tags.

For EN/FR translation, Grisot and Cartoni (2012) have shown that the English

present perfect and simple past tenses may correspond to either imparfait, pass´e

compos´ e orpass´e simple in French and have identifieda “narrativity” feature that helps

to make the correct translation choice. Using an automatic classifier for narrativity,

Meyer et al. (2013) showed that EN/FR translation of VPs in simple past tense was

improved by 10% in terms of tense choice and 0.2 BLEU points. In this paper, we build

on this idea and label English VPs directly with their predicted French tense for SMT.3
Research Gap

The future researcher needs to find out if silent way approach is effective in

different English grammar topics

Research Objectives

This research aims to answer the following questions;

1. Effectiveness of using Silent way approach in teaching present simple tense.

Significant of the Study

This research will be beneficial for the following:

1. Students – to be able to experience new technique in teaching English grammar

2. Teachers – to add teaching method that will be effective in teaching English

grammar.

Scope and Limitation

This research will assess the effectiveness of using Silent way approach in

teaching simple present tense.

Theoretical Framework
 One of the theories that is anchored with this study is Classical Conditioning by

Ivan Pavlov. The process of closely associating a neutral stimulus with one that evokes

a reflexive response so that eventually the neutral stimulus alone will evoke the same

response.

Classical conditioning is an important concept in the school of psychology known

as behaviorism, and it forms the basis for some of the techniques used in behavior

therapy. Pavlov formulated a theory about the relationship between stimuli and

responses that he believed could be applied to humans as well as to other animals. He

called the dogs’ salivation in response to the actual taste and smell of meat an

unconditioned response because it occurred through a natural reflex without any prior

training (the meat itself was referred to as an unconditioned stimulus).

This research utilized the Stimuli-Response, Stimulus-response (S-R) theories

are central to the principles of conditioning. They are based on the assumption

that human behaviour is learned. One of the early contributors to the field, American

psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, postulated the Law of Effect, which stated that those

behavioral responses (R) that were most closely followed by a satisfactory result were

most likely to become established patterns and to reoccur in response to the same

stimulus (S). This basic S-R scheme is referred to as unmediated. When an individual

organism (O) affects the stimuli in any way—for example, by thinking about a response

—the response is considered mediated. The S-O-R theories of behaviour are often

drawn to explain social interaction between individuals or groups.

 Research Method

This part of research discussed the research design, respondent of the study,

data analysis and ethical construction.

Research Design

The descriptive qualitative method is used in conducting this study. This method

presents the data in a form of numbers wherein it will be gathered through teachers’

answers in the questionnaires. Descriptive qualitative method describes the current

status of identified respondents and develops data after collecting it. Data will be

analyzed using standard deviation and mean.

Respondents Study

This study used two sets of subjects. The grade 11 students are used for pilot

testing and the grade 10 students are used to assess the effectiveness of using “Silent

Way Teaching” in teaching simple present tense.

Frequenc
Sex Percentage
y

Male 16 55%

Female 13 45%

Total 29 100%

Data Collection
 Data collection of qualitative descriptive studies focuses on discovering the nature

of the specific events under study. Thus, data collection involves minimal to moderate,

structured, open-ended, individual or focus group interviews. However, data collection

also may include observations, and examination of records, reports, photographs, and

documents. Data analysis of qualitative descriptive research, unlike other qualitative

approaches, does not use a pre-existing set of rules that have been generated from the

philosophical or epistemological stance of the discipline that created the specific

qualitative research approach. Rather, qualitative descriptive research is purely data-

derived in that codes are generated from the data in the course of the study. Like other

qualitative research approaches, qualitative descriptive studies generally are

characterized by simultaneous data collection and analysis (Lambert, 2012)

 Pilot Testing

Before the actual test in pre-testing, it will be conducted in the next grade for

validation of the items in the test. Then the item analysis based from the answers of the

students.

 Pre-testing

The students will answer the test after the item analysis. There are 55 items left

out of 60 items followed by analyzing the percentage of scores of the students for each

rules.

 Discussion

The teacher will teach the 4 chosen rules of subject verb agreement to Grade 10

section 9 or Garnet with the class size of 40.

  Post-Testing

After the discussion the students will be asked to answer the test and then

identifying the average of scores of the students.

Data Analysis

The rating in different areas is expressed in the following verbal interpretation

based from the mean figure.

For 50 item test:

Score Verbal Interpretation

22.50 – 30.00 Very Effective

15.50 – 22.49 Effective

7.5 – 15.49 Somehow Effective

0 – 7.4 Not Effective

Ethical Constructions

The research followed the ten points stated by Bryman and Bell (2007) the

following ten points represent the most important principles related to ethical

considerations in dissertations: (1) Research participants should not be subjected to

harm in any ways whatsoever. (2) Respect for the dignity of research participants

should be prioritized. (3) Full consent should be obtained from the participants prior to

the study. (4) The protection of the privacy of research participants has to be ensured.

(5) Adequate level of confidentiality of the research data should be ensured. (6)
Anonymity of individuals and organizations participating in the research has to be

ensured. (7) Any deception or exaggeration about the aims and objectives of the

research must be avoided. (8) Affiliations in any forms, sources of funding, as well as

any possible conflicts of interests have to be declared. (9) Any type of communication in

relation to the research should be done with honesty and transparency. (10) Any type of

misleading information, as well as representation of primary data findings in a biased

way must be avoided.

Following the Republic Act 10173 or also known as “Data privacy Act’, all of the data

gathered from subjects will be confidentiality to protect their privacy. The subjects were

aware that

Results and Findings

Skill Pre-Test Post-Test

Items
MEAN SD MEAN SD VI
Present Simple
Tense 30 15.50 4.93 22.66 5.51 VE

The respondents answered the 30 items test, in pretest the students got the

mean of 15.50, with the standard deviation of 4.93. In posttest they got the mean of

22.66 with 5.51, and verbal interpretation of “Very Effective”.

Discussion
 In pretest the respondents got the average of 15.50 in 30 item test, after the

application of the silent way teaching to the grade 10 students in went up to 22.66 with

5.51 standard deviation.

Conclusion

Based on the data shown above the researchers conclude the following:

1. After the discussion using silent way the students improved, as it shown in the

table. From the average of 15.50 went up to 22.66. It has the range of 9.99

2. The color coding for the correct and wrong verb is and effective stimuli for the

students, in identifying the correct form of verb.

3. Although that the mean improved, the standard deviation increased, which

means that the scores of the respondents are far more spread out, compare to

the pre-test. It could indicate that, there are some respondents left behind by the

fast learners.

4. The “Silent Way Approach” is very effective in case of simple present tense for

the grade 10 students of Raises – Pantok

 References

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a2/2799082396e23de29dcd64d3918a122d040a.pdf

https://research-methodology.net/research-methodology/ethical-considerations/

https://www.privacy.gov.ph/data-privacy-act/

https://www.privacy.gov.ph/data-privacy-act/#11

https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/grammar/verbtenses

The Practice of English Language Teaching - Jeremy Harmer PEARSON

Third edition of Meaning and the English book – Geoffrey Leech

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8147/83eab9e602aac2bf8cd8d2df0fd5712ef16f.pdf

https://research-methodology.net/research-methodology/ethical-considerations/

https://www.britannica.com/science/stimulus-response-theory

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/english/verb/problems-with-verbs