The Efficacy of Basic Sentence Pattern Approach for EFL Learners in Writing

Abstract

As a fundamental component of language, writing has been identified as the least proficient domain in acquiring a new language. Due to this universal idea, this research has been designed to find a more effective method to improve the writing skills of EFL learners and makes an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of a basic sentence pattern (BSP) drill through film corpus-based activities. To do this, as a pre-test, EFL learners were asked to make questionnaires with basic sentence patterns that translate Korean sentences into English to determine how much basic knowledge they had. For the questionnaires and the basic sentence pattern drill, the script of the American television series Modern Family (Lloyd & Levitan, 2014) was collected and categorized into five basic sentence patterns. Then, the learners were taught about the 5th basic sentence pattern, the most difficult pattern and were trained to practice this sentence pattern, repetitively, for a month. As a final step, they took a post-test after another month’s training. The results show the overall score was enhanced significantly from pre-test to post-test. This finding demonstrates that basic sentence patterns can enable EFL learners to develop their sentence accuracy in writing.