Grammar for Successful Written Discourse: Are the ESL/EFL students in Tanzania universities truly learning?

Grammar of a language is one of the key factors to successful writing at college or workplace. This study thought to investigate whether English grammar taught to undergraduate students in Tanzania helps them write well. 120 students were drone from one university and subjected to a writing test before and after grammar training. Thereafter, their texts were evaluated using rubrics, and scores analysed using Paired T-Test. The overall analysis reflected that there is a significant difference (t (119) = 4.398, p<0.05). However, this does not mean each grammatical item is statistically significant. A slight / no difference was realised on some grammatical items. The study recommends instructors to put much effort on all the grammatical components, but with a special focus on sentences construction and punctuation skills, tenses, linking signals and paragraph crafting, since these are the areas which the study showed that students have serious weaknesses. Key terms: Discourse, Intensive Grammar, Learning, ESL/EFL Students 1.0 Introduction Tanzania has made great efforts to improve enrolment and infrastructures in all levels of learning. However, the quality of graduates has remained questionable to stakeholders. For Intensive Grammar Course (IGC) taught to first year undergraduate students in universities in the country, stakeholders have been complaining that despite students having learnt it, many keep on producing a lot of grammatical errors in both spoken and written English. Specifically, managers of various companies where students go to work after graduation send outcries that our graduates cannot communicate effectively in English the language that was used to transfer skills/trainings when they were in schools and colleges. In the country, the medium of instruction at post primary education is English language. However, many students have been facing problems of communication in English when they join higher education. In order to minimise the problems, Communication Skills (SC) course was introduced in all universities in the country, with the aim of aiding students to improve abilities to learn other 1 ESL is an abbreviation for English as a Second Language. ESL students learn English as a Second Language (L2) where English is a dominant language. On the other way, EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language. EFL students, study English where English is not a dominant language, so they have limited exposure to English. Outside the classrooms, there are few opportunities of using English. For Tanzanian context, we have mixed features of ESL and EFL classrooms. However, there are more features of ESL than EFL. Hence our classrooms would be better called ESL. ISSN: 2411-5681 www.ijern. com 310 courses efficiently and effectively and communicate efficiently through English in and out of their specialised subjects. In this regard, in many universities in the country, SC has been taught for many years now. Notably, at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), SC is taught to first year undergraduate students in the first and second semesters. Formerly, SC was taught only in the first semester; later it was realised that teaching SC only in semester one could not help much to make students change, then it was spelt into two: Intensive Grammar Course (IGC) commonly known as Communication Skills I (SCI) and Communication Skills II (SCII). For that case, SCI is grammar based and it functions as a remedy to students found to have weak English Language Proficiency (ELP) at the point of entry, and SCII is mainly study skills, and is offered in semester two, to help students develop study skills particularly in writing, speaking, reading and listening. Generally, splitting SC into two helped to cover the two parts intensively, although still there are outcries from stakeholders that SC taught in our universities is not making any headway in enhancing effective communication. In essence, the goal for teaching IGC is to enable students to transfer learning to their specialised program courses. In particular, this means that they should write grammatical discourse in SC and in other courses, and the discourse should be seen to flow together in a clear and appropriate grammar. In fact, the readers have to make very little effort to understand the meaning and the information should seem to come in a natural order (Lynch & Anderson, 2013). In the light of this fact, many instructors complain that they spend a lot of time going through a single written text because they struggle to understand what the students wanted to mean, and sometimes, they end up not getting the intended meaning because the text is not fluently written. A typical example is when instructors write comments like ‘what do you mean? ’ ‘I cannot follow your text’, your text is full of erroneous structure, etc., in students’ texts to signal that what they have written is vague and confusing. Therefore, if a student does not know the grammar of the language used in writing s/he cannot write clearly in that language. 1.2 Problem Statement Grammar of a language is one of the key factors to successful writing. Despite SC being taught in the country for many years, many people particularly where graduates go to work after graduations, complain that many graduates cannot communicate effectively in written or spoken English. It seems, the goals for teaching SC have not been attained since then. Mwakapina (2011) argues that most of the students before graduation and after graduation still manifest low communicative abilities in English as a Second Language (L2). Similarly, Jordan(1997), Johns (1997), Carson (1997), Prior (1998) and Hintel, (2002a) argue that despite students having studied English as well as academic writing in English in their native and in English speaking countries, non –native speaking students experience a great deal of difficulty in their studies at college and university levels in English speaking countries. Therefore, the problem is inherent to both nonnative students who study in their native countries, and even those who go to study abroad. Many studies have established strong positive linkages between students’ academic performance and grammar and writing proficiencies (Johns, 1997; Jordan, 1997; Lee & Schallert, 1997; byrd & Reid, 1998; Zhou, 2009). In Tanzania, for instance, many instructors complain that students undergo SC courses in the first year, but as they enter into subsequent years, still they seem to be like those who have not attended the course, since many cannot communicate effectively. In other words, in Tanzania, this is like saying there is no positive linkage between performance and International Journal of Education and Research Vol. 4 No. 3 March 2016 311 grammar and writing proficiencies because even after learning, many students cannot communicate effectively. Generally, this shows that teaching and learning processes take place with no effect of helping students change. Given the overwhelming assumption that undergraduate students in the country, even after having undergone training in SC, many cannot communicate effectively neither in spoken nor in written English. This study intended to address the matter scientifically by examining, whether students do not reflect a change after having learnt IGC. Specifically, the study investigated (i) whether there is no significant difference between what students write before, and what they write after the training of English grammar, and (ii) examined whether is true that there is no change in all of the grammar components taught in the IGC. Based on these objectives, there were two null hypotheses (H0): The first one was, there is no significant difference between what students write before the training and after the training of IGC in universities in Tanzania, and the second one was, on every key individual grammar component (i.e sentence construction, tenses, articles and nouns use, etc.,) taught in IGC, students do not reflect a significant change after training. 2.0 Theoretical Underpinnings 2.1 Overview Grammar of a language is one of the key factors to successful writing. Actually, when writing any academic text, there are key areas of grammar that one needs to know, so as to be able to express himself /herself effectively in the appropriate and correct grammar. For IGC taught to undergraduate students at SUA, the topics have been organised in a such a way that if a student covers the course well by doing all the tasks, assignments, activities and practices provided by the instructor, at the end of the course s/he will be able to express himself/herself in a correct and appropriate grammar. The next section is devoted at explaining the natty-gritty details of IGC. 2.2 Components of Intensive Grammar Course In IGC students are taught six main topics. One of these topics is about basic sentence structure. Students learn rules governing the construction of sentences in English language. The next is on the sentence logic and clarity (agreements of a Subject(S) and a Verb (V) and a Pronoun (P) and its Antecedent (A)). The other topic is the verb phrase/ tense system. Under this, various verb tenses are discussed. Topic four is about the finite and non finite verb forms. The fifth is about articles and noun classes. Articles are the smallest grammatical units which specify definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun and whose membership include a, an, the, zero and some. The last one is about conjunctions/connectors. Connectors/ transitional makers are discussed on the way they can be used to link ideas within and above the sentences. 2.3 Fundamental Grammar for Successful Academic Writing According to this study, grammar of a language is understood based on Lynch and Anderson’s (2013) definition, as the rule system of a language, but it is also useful to think of it as a resource for expressing meaning. For example, when one is said to have known the grammar of English lan