Ten Sentence Patterns (10SP)

Grammatical terms can be very confusing, redundant, and problematic which many teachers want to avoid, one reason why many teachers do not like to teach grammar explicitly and leave grammar entirely, and if they were to teach grammar, they only focus on the simple grammar rules. For example, relative clause, adjective clause, subordinate clause, and dependent clause can refer to the same grammatical units, besides teachers find very difficult to explain why certain relative pronouns, e.g., whom or who should be used, or when a is referred to an article or a determiner, or should noun phrase be referred as subject, object, or complement, or whether it is in the subjective, accussative, or dative cases, or whether teacher should consider future tense as the third tense in teaching the aspects of the verb, since English does not have future tense, even though there are many ways of talking about the future. English grammar is full of irregularites which makes it difficult for teachers to explain.

Additionally, grammar is a very big area of study, therefore, it is impossible for teachers to teach everything, as a result determining what is relevant for teaching is very imporatnt and will be very beneficial, if teachers can focus on reliable grammar prototypes that help students to generate simple grammatical units and transform them into complex grammatical units based on certain principles such as generative and transformative grammar. The process of generating and transforming helps the students to acquire the skills of hypothesis formation, testing, modification, confirmation, and rejection which enhance the system of L2 acquisition. The grammatical prototypes, for example, the sentence patterns (SP) will be the main focus of teaching objectives which act as the core syllabus of teaching grammar. Focusing on SP enables teachers to plan their lessons and prepare resources economically. As a results, teachers can prepare their teaching materials which would be easily shared among themselves. For example, in teaching SP1 (NP + be + NP), the choice of selecting an NP will depend on the level of the students and if one set of materials is not suitable for one group then it can be used with other groups that meet their needs.

CUSTOMIZING ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM FOR EFL LEARNERS The time of teaching of rules/grammar will be minimal because all the 10SPs apply the same

principles—generative and transformative. These similar principles can be applied from the first SP to 10th SP, so teachers can expect that by the time they reach half of the SPs, students would have understood the grammar and would be able to apply the principles in constructing sentences and utterances on their own. The acquision of these principles would empower students and make them more confident in using the language. The generative principle enables the possibilities of sequencing, the sentence patterns and transformative principle and provides the learners with the tools of changing the language from large to small and vice versa. All lessons are organized in such a way that these transformative and generative principles will be integrated in all language skills such as reading, listening, speaking, and writing as shown in Figure 2.

Implementation of the 10 sentence patterns (10SP) using materials is provided by consultants from UPSI (Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris). The teachers will be trained with methods and techniques of teaching 10SP adopting action research model of instruction. The 10SP syllabus will be exploited explicitly through three stages: (1) proper explanation and practices; (2) recognition and discrimination in reading; (3) question and answer activities; (4) retelling the text; and (5) writing.

The 10SP in teaching of English Language is: (1) NP + be + NP; (2) NP + be + AdjP; (3) NP + be + PreP; (4) There + be + NP + PrepP; (5) SV (Adv); (6) SVO; (7) SVO (Adv); (8) SVOdOi; (9) SVOdOi (Adv); (10) Passives and Modals. 10SP introduces all grammatical units and empowers students with the skills of generating and

transforming principles of English as a second language. The transformative principles allow students to perform skills such as questioning Yes/No, Tag, Whq, active-passive, subordination and generating larger language units such as compounding, noun phrase (adjective and adjectival) and verb phrase (verbs and adverbials). The generative principles allow students to generate basic grammatical structures to the complex units such as complex noun phrases, adverbials, and long cumulative sentences. These two principles enable students to apply soft skills of second language acquisition by hypothesis formation, testing, modification, confirmation, and rejection into their L2 development system.

Recognition in

Language Forms

and Functions • SP1

• Principles and

• Production rules

• SP1

• Wh-q and

activities 10 SP

• Parsing

Production in

Speaking

Writing

Figure 1. The process of providing salient input.

Generative & Transformative

Principles

Figure 2. Integration of language skills in the acquisition SP.

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CUSTOMIZING ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM FOR EFL LEARNERS

Ten Sentence Patterns (10SP)