The Effect of Story-Grammar Instruction on Poor College Students' Achievement of Narrative Texts' Theme Identification

Abstract

The problem of this study arises from the fact that most students are not quite able to identify theme in narrative texts. Poor students need more explanation in how they can identify theme, therefore the researchers proposed teaching the story grammar by using related key words(because, as a result, since, then, after, before, next, same as, as compared, different from, unlike, but,…etc.)for facilitating theme identification. In order to find out the results, the following null hypothesis has been posed: There are no differences between the achievement of the good students and the poor students after teaching the latter the story- grammar to identify the narrative theme. In the experimental group, the poor students have been taught the elements of story grammar and how they can use the fore mentioned key words in theme identification. After that both the experimental group and control group sat for a test of theme identification to find the differences between them. The findings of this study indicate that there are no differences between the two groups, in other words the teaching of story grammar helps the poor students to become better in theme identification. In the light of the findings of the present study, several conclusions, recommendations and suggestions for further study have been made.