Evaluating the effectiveness of two activities in teaching /d/, /t/ and /id/, with the purpose of identifying the acquisition of two phonemes and one morpheme in students from seventh and ninth grade in two schools from de RM

Abstract

Chile is one of the many countries that wants to introduce itself in this economical world, where many languages gather. However, our language, Spanish, is not the most used language during these opportunities, where the country can be seen worldwide. English has established itself as a world known language, and its uses can vary between economic situation, or just going abroad and interact with other people from different places. Taking this into account, Chile has included English in its curriculum and has set the proficie ncy level ‘’B1’’ according to the Reference for Languages [ CEFR], Common European Framework of as a parameter to where the efforts, in terms of teaching English, must be put for the students to achieve that requirement. This level of English comprises eve ry aspect that a language has: Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing/Use of English. These skills must be trained in Chilean educational establishments by applying different didactical approaches, for the students to practice and acquire all of the abil ities mentioned above. MINEDUC’s didactical approach to teach English is specified in its curricular bases where taskbased language teaching, with focus on communicative aspects, it is explicitly written that should be constructed in relation to where th e school is situated, that means having into consideration where both the student and the school is located. As MINEDUC exposes in their English teaching curriculum, the focus will be centered on the communication of the student, and also considering the characteristics of where the subject is being taught. (MINEDUC, 2013) context The time spent in teaching how to pronounce, or even giving the students tools which they can use to improve their reading skills, is something that was brought to our attention during this time in our practicum establishments. According to what we have seen in the places where we are doing our practicum, and in our own experience in Chilean schools, it is almost nonexistent the instances where the students can develop all the lan guage skills, apart from Writing or Listening, which are the most common skills that are acquire by students. This particular situation raised the question, to find didactical approaches to teach speaking in a way in which the students will be exposed to a fun activity, and learn how to pronounce better through it, particularly regular verbs and their ed final pronunciation. It is common to hear from students that they do not know how to do the final verbs or that it is complicated to ed sound in regular say it. This can be explained by Linguistics, specifically both Spanish and English way that the language is structured, and it has relation with cluster: a group of consonants that does not have a vowel between them. Since there are not consonant clusters in Spanish in final position, there is a difficulty, in terms of the speaker’s mother tongue, to produce certain sounds in English that have those clusters in final position (e.g. raised /reist/), such as the final certain words. ed sound in These group of consonants are going to be hard to acquire for Spanish students, for the reasons mentioned before, but also because of the time that a teacher spends in activities where the student has to speak, therefore the need to search for didactical ways in which the students can obtain that knowledge. As teachers of English we need to provide the right tools for our students to achieve an adequate and effective development of their skills of oral production, as well as provide tools that can be used by others te achers for their lessons. Our research will be framed in a quantitative character which will allow us to study the effect iveness of the ludic activities (games) in the teaching of the corresponding phonemes, /d/, /t/, and /ɪd/, to the respective levels (7th and 9th grade) in two schools in the RM, allowing us to find the most suitable activities for our students and thus che ck if we obtain better results in their pronunciation. The comparison of average results between the class with recreational educational activities of oral production and the other with nothing more than their regular classes will be our data collection, which will be subsequently analyzed for validation or invalidation of our hypothesis.