DIFFICULTIES FACED BY G.C.E.(A/L) STUDENTS WHEN LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN SAMMANTHURAI

Abstract

This study aims to examine the difficulties encountered in written tasks of General English subject when learning English as a second language by the first-year students of G.C.E. (A/L) in the academic year 2018 -2020 at KM/ST/ Dharussalam Maha Vidyalaya, Sammanthurai. The specific objectives of the study are to identify the grammatical difficulties made by the students when accomplishing written tasks; to provide the language teachers with new techniques and methodologies of language teaching by analyzing the students’ difficulties; to make the students aware about their incompetence in linguistics; to adapt the identified activities to cater the A/L students’ linguistic competence; and to identify the association between the students and the exposure to the second language. The Research samples were 30 monolingual students who learn English as their second language. These students were selected randomly. A pre-test and post-test which comprise grammatical and paragraph typed questions based on the General English subject were administered. A quantitative data analysis approach was implemented to analyze the pre and post test scores of the experimental and controlled group. EA method was deployed to analyze the grammatical errors. The findings of the study show that many students face difficulties in the grammatical components such as parts of the speech, syntactic structures, vocabularies and mechanics of writing due to incompetence in English grammar, inefficiency in syntactic structure, deficiency in vocabulary, incomplete application of rules, omission, addition, bad formation of sentences, redundant lexical choice, lack of exposure to English language and mother tongue interreference. The study suggests assigning the students with plenty of written tasks continuously, using effective syntactic strategy in the authentic classroom to get the interests of the students, improving the skills on the grammatical components by using audio-visual, strengthening teachers with smart classroom facilities to carry out the teaching process and building up the culture of using the second language in the learning and teaching process. These efforts as remedies are used to solve the difficulties faced in written tasks by G.C.E. (A/L) students when learning English as a second language in Sammanthurai. The study hopes to help the ESL teachers and educators to be familiar with the most frequent difficulties faced by L2 learners and to adapt appropriate strategy in preparing learning teaching activities.