School of Education, Culture and Communication Teaching Grammar in efl classrooms in Swedish Upper-Secondary School

Figure 4: Test scores (in percent) after the GCR approach, boys (N=6)

Both G1 and G3 (taught with the GCR approach) were fairly similar. Although G1 seemed more interested in the task at hand, there were plenty of informants in G3 who seemed interested as well. The teaching session with G3 was a bit delayed as half the group showed up late to the scheduled lesson and the session had to start over after ten minutes. However, in

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the opinion of G3’s regular teacher (who was present at the time of the teaching session), this did not affect the experiment or results negatively.

Figure 4 shows that the boys taught with the GCR approach had grasped the concept of singular -s’s best, with 100% correct answers for that form. The form that the boys scored the lowest on was the plural -’s with 33% correct answers. Of the individual answers provided, 50% were deemed correct, e.g. In my backyard I found my dog’s ball and The beaver’s teeth are strong, while the other half of the answers, such as My parents’s house is big and The house’s doors are tall and wide, were incorrect.

For the girls taught according to the GCR approach, all genitive forms had higher shares of correct answers than incorrect ones (Figure 5). We can see that these informants scored 92% correct on the singular -s’s form, which was the form that the girls scored the highest on, while the girls scored their lowest on the two plural forms, each with 56% correct answers. 70% of the individual answers were correct, as in The driver of the bus and My mother’s food tastes good, while the incorrect answers included The dog’s has only one eye and This house is my brothers.

100
		92
90
		80
80
									72			70
70
					56		56
60
50																		Correct
					44		44
40																		Incorrect
											28	30
30
		20
20
		8
10
0
		Singular -'s Singular -s's				Plural -s'		Plural 's		Of-phrase Individual
													answers