Exploring Digital Ways for Teaching Basic English Grammar of EFL

(English for Foreign Language) Context: An Experience of Indonesian

Students

Arimuliani Ahmad

Universitas Islam Riau, Pekanbaru, Indonesia

Keywords:

Digital ways, Kahoot, Padlet, Basic English Grammar, E-learning

Abstract:

Nowadays, the integration of technology and education is common and useful option in order to achieve learn-

ing outcomes especially for teaching foreign language. The gap of learning experience can be avoided. This

article exposes the utilization of Padlet and Kahoot! in teaching Basic English Grammar in EFL (English for

foreign language) context. This study was qualitative approach. The result of this research exposes the imple-

mentation of Padlet as one useful alternative to teach Basic English Grammar to elaborate others multimedia

which can enhance students’ understanding of the lesson and ease students to create and submit students’

work creatively as an effort to fulﬁll the challenge of 21 century competence. Besides, all logs and data

keep permanently online so lecturer can manage their document well. Furthermore, Kahoot! also becomes

one alternative to reduce students’ anxiety in learning English Grammar, because it is designed joyful with

completed audio-visual feature and having a break as suitable as needed.

1 INTRODUCTION

Teaching Grammar for English as Foreign Language

is commonly challenging. Many factors are involved

such as students’ negative mindset of grammar itself

which is quite hard to be mastered because it has dif-

ferent rules with their mother tongue (Ahmad, 2014).

Besides, common obstacle of its atmosphere is bore-

dom. The way teacher builds up students’ understand-

ing of grammar often make they feel boring because

it is not suitable with their willing. Therefore, the lec-

turer provides grammar task conventionally on certain

book or paper. Overall, grammar lesson seems unin-

terested lesson but actually it is important point due to

master English skills. Their grammar competence is

inﬂuenced their English proﬁciency included listen-

ing, speaking, reading and writing.

Perception that they bring from senior high school

continues to higher education. In the beginning, stu-

dents who just adjust new policies, strategies and

rules in university level need more motivation to

change their learning habit. Besides, there a lot of

different points of view of teacher in high school level

than university level. It seems that university lecturer

should review and reinforce what they should master

in early level which they do not master enough previ-

ously.

Therefore, many studies reveal the positive effect

of technology integrated in teaching and learning pro-

cess. First, digital tools such as YouTube and Blog

can improve students’ vocabulary mastery (Arndt and

Woore, 2018). Other studies also prove that Moodle

gives beneﬁts for students’ proﬁciency (Wu and Hua,

2008) (Levy, 2009) (Rad, 2018) (Abunabah, 2012)

(Nedeva et al., 2010) (Nozawa, 2011). Besides, e-

learning also gives good contribution toward students’

English proﬁciency such as Edmodo (Al-Naibi et al.,

2018), Padlet (Kleinsmith, 2017), Facebook (Wang

et al., 2012), (Ingalls, 2017), and (Kalelio

glu et al.,

2017), Blackboard’s Discussion Boards, Blogs and

Wikis (Alharbi, 2015), Whatsapp (Fattah, 2015).

In order to overcome those problems, university

lecturers need to explore digital ways in teaching.

There are a lot of digital tools can be adopted in teach-

ing as online or ofﬂine. Researcher has developed

e-module to teach Basic English Grammar (Ahmad,

2017), the result show there is improvement of stu-

dents’ grammar competence but it is not directly ful-

ﬁlling the researcher expectation. Teaching and learn-

ing process need to be revised. Researcher must con-

sider about joy and cheerfulness. Even though learn-

ing grammar is hard but they do not try to avoid it.

One solution to manage teaching and learning pro-

Ahmad, A.

Exploring DigitalWays for Teaching Basic English Grammar of EFL (English for Foreign Language) Context: An Experience of Indonesian Students.

DOI: 10.5220/0009105402330237

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education and Humanity (ICoSEEH 2019) - Sustainable Development in Developing Country for Facing Industrial

Revolution 4.0, pages 233-237

ISBN: 978-989-758-464-0

233

cess is combination of using digital tools as gamiﬁca-

tion strategy which is Kahoot! and Padlet. Licorish

et al (Licorish et al., 2018) reveal students’ percep-

tion toward Kahoot!. They found that it gets positive

perception from students, therefore it involves stu-

dents’ participation and increase students’ motivation

in learning because Kahoot! provides audio-visual,

and timely feedback. Kahoot! engages students-

lecturer interaction. Then, it also has a break to en-

sure students focus on the game which reﬂected by

projector on the screen. Furthermore, Padlet also give

beneﬁts on students’ proﬁciency (Kleinsmith, 2017)

(De Berg, 2016). Berg (De Berg, 2016) designed

his research by combining Padlet with Project-based

learning. He focuses on students’ language proﬁ-

ciency and their soft skills such as creativity and prob-

lem solving. The result also provides students per-

ception. The result shows that the highest level of

students’ respond is enjoyment.

This research is designed to teach Basic English

Grammar course in Teacher Training and Education

Faculty of one private university in Indonesia. It uti-

lizes Kahoot! and Padlet by adapted material which is

familiar with our students to make they ease to master

the lesson.

2 BACKGROUND LITERATURE

REVIEW

2.1 Padlet

A padlet

is a kind of e-learning which provides a

virtual pin board that allows students to collaborate

various ﬁles, including Word documents, YouTube

videos, PowerPoint presentations, etc. It can be uti-

lized to collect students’ works or also lesson provid-

ing by lecturer by integrating varieties of ﬁles or mul-

timedia. It gives opportunity for students to do collab-

orative work or project that can be done everywhere

and every time they need. Besides, it also provides

timely feedback which can be addressed to students

or lecturer as input of their project.

In teaching Basic English Grammar, researcher

implement this tool to enhance students’ grammar

competence by integrated particular videos and les-

son from authentic context from native speakers of

English language. After learning that lesson au-

tonomously, the students were expected to do some

exercises on that board.

www.padlet.com

2.2 Kahoot!

Kahoot!

is one of digital tools which adopted gam-

iﬁcation strategy. This is can be accessed by android

application or online searching (web-based). This

tool provides audio-visual ﬁles, and timely feedback,

automatic scoring, and having a break. Fortunately,

lecturer can prepare their own content to ensure stu-

dents’ understanding which suitable with their cul-

ture. As closer the content/questions with the stu-

dents’ experience as ease for students to understand

that.

Kahoot! allows lecturer to create appropriate con-

tent with their own syllabus which focus on his/her

learning objectives. Lecturer constructs the quiz in

which students participate as payers in a game show

(Wang, 2015) and adopt informal situation for learn-

ing assessment which provide cozy situation by au-

dio and podium point system) that facilitate students’

competition to get three podiums as top three of all

participants. This is easy applying for lecturer or

students in teaching and learning process; therefore,

prior training is not needed to use it (Plump and

LaRosa, 2017). Indeed, lecturer also can integrate this

tool with other media such as presentation slide (Ms.

Power Point) in the classroom as additional task to see

students’ understanding of the lesson. This quiz can

be created with additional image or video to provide

extra input for the questions and the lecturer can con-

trol it which controls the timeline, skipping question,

and setting for random questions. the competition at-

mosphere can be built up because the score will be

awarded by considering timeliness and correctness.

So, the students need to answer the question correctly

and quickly to get higher score. Showing students’

score on the screen will build up students’ motiva-

tion and engagement because they feel winner spirit

to lead the board (Barrio et al., 2015), (Wang and

Lieberoth, 2016). Therefore, designing the questions,

administrating the quiz, and also facilitate discussion

about (in) correct questions together in the classroom

can be organized by the lecturer in implementation of

Kahoot! for face-to face learning. Overall, Kahoot!

can increase students’ learning experience more dy-

namic (Licorish et al., 2018).

2.3 Teaching Basic English Grammar

Course

Basic English Grammar is the ﬁrst level of Gram-

mar course that have been taught for English Major

of Teacher Training and Education faculty in Univer-

kahoot.com

ICoSEEH 2019 - The Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education, and Humanity

234

sitas Islam Riau. End of this class, students are ex-

pected to be able to identify, analyze and implement

correct rule in English language (Grammar) as spo-

ken and written. This course consists of three credits

for one semester. There are sixteen meetings for one

semester with twelve topics which are designed by the

lecturer and legalized by our Dean.

First topic is about Parts of Speech. The students

are expected to master the types and the usages of

it in sentence. There are eight parts involve such

as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposi-

tion, conjunction and interjection (Lester, 2005). Sec-

ond topic is about Clause which consists of main

clause, subordinate clause, relative clause, and noun

clause. Third topic is about sentence. They are ex-

pected to comprehend sentence types such as sim-

ple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence

and compound-complex sentence. Fourth topic is

about Tenses for two meetings. Fifth topic is about

Subject-verb Agreement. Sixth topic is about modal

auxiliaries. Seventh topic is about Active-Passive

Sentence. Eighth topic is about Direct and Indirect

Speech. Ninth topic is about Gerund and Inﬁnitive.

Eleventh topic is about Conditional Sentence. The

last topic is WH-Questions.

Overall, this research addressed to explore the

researchers’ experience in teaching Basic English

Grammar through digital ways. There were two re-

search questions:

RQ1: How was the implementation of digital ways

through Padlet and Kahoot! in teaching Basic English

Grammar?

RQ2: How are the students’ engagement toward the

implementation of Padlet and Kahoot! in learning Ba-

sic English Grammar.

3 METHODOLOGY

This research adopted qualitative approach. The pur-

pose of this research was to expose the implementa-

tion and students’ engagement of digital tools; Padlet

and Kahoot! in teaching Basic English Grammar

(Grammar 1). There were 140 students as participant

of this research from ﬁrst semester students of English

Language Education of Universitas Islam Riau. The

instrument of this research was digital documentation.

All logs and data were kept on Padlet and Kahoot!

Platform.

4 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

RQ1: How was the implementation of digital ways

through Padlet and Kahoot! in teaching Basic English

Grammar?

All logs and students’ tasks were documented on-

line whether Padlet or Kahoot!. Firstly, the imple-

mentation of Padlet addressed to build up students’

understanding of lesson with certain topics. To illus-

trate it, see appendix 1. The lecture adopted Blended

Learning in teaching Basic English Grammar. Lec-

turer took three meetings as online learning (outside

the classroom) for Inﬁnitive and Gerund, Tenses, and

WH-Question topic. Students were expected to learn

by using material that has been pinned on Padlet

board then they needed to answer certain questions

to see their understanding toward the lesson. There

were two ways of answering the exercises; 1) they

did the task by posting it on that board, 2) they com-

mended on comment space below the material. For

lesson The Use of Gerund and Inﬁnitive lesson, they

were asked to watch two videos about it from BBC

YouTube Channel. Those videos illustrate the use

of Gerund and Inﬁnitive in real condition of native

daily communication (British) to understand the use

of them in the real context. Besides, they needed to

read three sequent posts (1

Reading, 2

Reading

and 3

Reading) for further explanation of Gerund

and Inﬁnitive. Next, they were asked to do the exer-

cises on that pin board (Padlet).

Furthermore, every face-to face learning in

the classroom, lecturer implemented Kahoot! as

exercises. Lecturer explained the lesson in the

classroom by giving written examples on whiteboard

as implemented of instructional method. Lecturer

explained the lesson by asking students’ engagement.

Lecturer strove to increase teaching and learning

dynamic by attacking student’ concentration. It was

done by asking selecting students to come forward

and giving direct instruction about the topic. They

were asked to write example of using grammar

(suitable for each topic for every meeting). For

example, when they learn and discuss about sentence

types, therefore, lecturer asked students to write

down one example for each type. After that, lecturer

and students in the classroom correct it together.

Finally, the end of meeting about 30 minutes, lecturer

played a Kahoot! (see appendix 2) to see students’

understanding and also discuss about the correct ex-

planation about their mistakes. It can be accessed by

https://create.kahoot.it/share/basic-english-grammar-

test/9be65ff6-42cb-440d-a2cc-6491be9dfa19.

Overall, teaching and learning process becomes

more dynamic by using this Kahoot (gamiﬁcation).

Exploring DigitalWays for Teaching Basic English Grammar of EFL (English for Foreign Language) Context: An Experience of Indonesian

Students

235

It motivates students to learn and it can achieve stu-

dents’ concentration a lot. They more focus on the

material on the screen. They need to answer the ques-

tions correctly and quickly to get better score. They

need to compete to be the ﬁrst podium as winner. Fair

competition was created by the lecturer, and then ei-

ther special gift is delivered for ﬁrst podium of winner

or good additional score is delivered to ﬁrst and sec-

ond podium of winner. Besides, they also seem enjoy

the process because Kahoot! also provide audio and

visual features. They are engaged in quiz by facing

the screen and their gadget, they are commonly panic

if they are misconnecting on the link. It is reﬂected by

their request to play the quiz by using Kahoot! again

for every meeting. Additionally, lecturer also utilized

Kahoot! for examination process (see ﬁgure 1). To

sum up, it can reduce students’ anxiety to learn or face

quiz of Grammar.

Figure 1: Examination Process by using Kahoot!

Figure 1 illustrated situation of Grammar test by

using Kahoot!. The students had to prepare their gad-

get and its connection to access the Kahoot’s link and

then they registered to the game id by typing their

full name. After all of students registered, lecturer

played the game by integrated projector and her pc to

show the question. Furthermore, students answered

25 questions by using their own gadget. Every single

question had duration to 60 seconds. At the end, they

directly known their score.

5 CONCLUSION AND

IMPLICATION

Nowadays, technology is not a luxurious thing any-

more but it is a common need of every person around

the world. For advanced country, it is a common thing

but for developed country it is different. It is a kind of

precious thing to be maximized especially for teach-

ing and learning process. There are a lot of free ap-

plications or software as digital tools that can be im-

plemented to enhance the learning objectives. Com-

monly, it needs a lot of trial and errors to reveal the

advantages of them in learning. The only one classic

problem in my country is about internet access. In-

deed, the same thing with these two digital tools, there

are many researches prove the positive contribution of

using technology in order to achieve learning objec-

tives. It is better to further researchers to create digital

tools which can be accessed ofﬂine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Researcher would like to deliver thank to head of En-

glish Language Education of Universitas Islam Riau

to allow online ﬁnal test for Basic English Grammar

Course and students who participated to this study.

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Students

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