CHALLENGES OF LEARNING ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN A RURAL NIGERIAN COMMUNITY

Abstract

This article described the challenges of learning English grammar among the Junior Secondary School (JSS) students in a rural community in Khana Local Government Area (L.G.A.) of Rivers State. The objectives are to identify the difficulties, describe the causes and proffer possible solutions. The research design is qualitative. An achievement test on sentences that comprise some English words which can function both as nouns and verbs, and also on verbs only was administered on 38 purposively selected JSS1 students of Community Secondary School, Luubaara. The findings revealed that the students who had no prior exposure to English in real-life contexts had difficulties identifying the words that only function as nouns in Khana but can as well function as verbs in English while those exposed to English were able to identify their verbs functions. The study concluded that students’ lack of opportunities to use English for communication in the rural community posed a hindrance to their learning of the syntactic behaviour of words that can function both as noun and verbs in English but only function either as nouns or verbs in their L1. The study recommends that the teaching and learning of English in rural communities should use a bi/multilingual approach that encourages explicit grammar teaching utilizing conscious raising grammar tasks that provide pedagogic activities on some forms of English grammar which the learners do and also supports the use of translanguaging and translation as teaching strategies that would enable the students to achieve explicit understanding of the grammatical features of English that differ from the grammar of their native language. There should also be a re-skilling of the English language teachers, whether they are native speakers of the learners’ L1 or not, and an improvement in their approaches to teaching English grammar.