Correcting Students' Concord Errors

Abstract

This study is an endeavor to design a strategy or teaching model by which Subject-Verb concord could be taught. to enhance the performance of students in Senior Secondary Schools (SSS), which have been re-named in 2007 as Senior High Schools" Errors of concord, including Subject-Verb concord, have been a problem to many Ghanaian students and a concern to many interested parties such as parents and the West Africa Examinations Council. Consequently, some researchers have studied the errors of students and others have designed methods to solve some of these student errors. This work considers the pronoun as the basis for teaching Subject- Verb concord. The research methodology is eclectic. combining elements of quantitative and qualitative research; oral interviews were conducted and a questionnaire administered to students to Identify their peculiar problems as second language leaners. In addition, diagnostic tests (pre- intervention and post- intervention tests)were conducted to examine the possible difficulties of the learners. An experiment class was selected and the language teaching model which is being proposed in this study for the teaching of Subject-verb agreement was taught to that class, while the: other two classes were excluded. Measurement of the effects of the treatment was done through a post intervention test. The results of the post-intervention test show that the experiment class did better than the other two classes, which indicates that the model could be useful in the teaching of subject-verb concord in Ghanaian schools.