A Cloze-styled Textual Enhancement Targeting Prepositions
Keywords:
Cloze, Text Enhancement, Incidental Learning, EFL, SLAAbstract
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 Clozestyled 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
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