Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
Region VII, Central Visayas
Division of Guihulngan City

Contextualized iSAW on the Sentence Construction Skills of the

Grade 7 Learners: Learning Reinforcement

An Action Research

Conducted By:

JOAN MAE G. GARSULA

INTRODUCTION

Context and Rationale

Preparing teaching materials in secondary schools and English subjects as lessons

are frequently insufficient. Many times, dictionaries and textbooks are lacking in schools.

Due to the lack of a credential to teach English subject, the lack of training, and the

inadequate English ability, teachers themselves may be unprepared. These difficulties

may be exacerbated by the fact that teachers and students may not have any opportunity

to use English outside of the classroom and may speak multiple main and instructional

languages (Balderston, Rakotoarisoa, & Sahondranirina, 2020).

Teaching effectiveness in the Philippines is the constant aim of every English

teacher. Whether a teacher is a fresh graduate or an experienced one, there will always be

a need to adopt, improve and improvise teaching strategies to adapt to the ever-changing

world of the learners. Students who want to write well must have a solid comprehension

of sentences. Perhaps needless to say, the more comfortable students are with their ability

to construct sentences, the less they need to concentrate on the sentence construction

portion. It allows them to experiment with their word choice, sentence structure, and

writing style. Only when a person is grammatically skilled can do the two. Even though

some students may be proficient in English (IOER INTERNATIONAL

MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH JOURNAL, 2020). Similar to this, a lot of

Filipino students struggle with writing. Consequently, sentence structure is required. .

only needs the skills in reading and comprehension but also to be able to write and speak

the English language and understand what they meant.

Learning gaps in the different learning areas encountered during the previous

learning modality are identified in the locality. Moreover, learning continuity is an

incessant endeavour of the Department of Education, and as the Guihulngan City

Division envision learning continuity. In its continuous efforts to uphold the teaching-

learning process amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, an advocacy of the expansion of limited

Face-to-face classes across the City Division is conducted. Allowing the English teachers

to deliver quality and efficient instructions especially in the learning gap of writing skills

in the English language (Guihulngan City Division, 2022).

Constructing and using sentences as a basic skill is more productive when there

are available and sufficient instructional materials, notwithstanding shortage of

instructional learning materials in the English subject is evident. Funds are not enough to

cater to the needs on instructional materials needed in the two grade 7 sections of

Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School. This is evident during the result of the

First Quarter Examination, as 65% or 42 out of 52 grade 7 students got low scores in

sentence construction. During post evaluation conference, the students raised their

concerns regarding additional and contextualized learning materials. The researcher

considered that there is a need to create a contextualized sentence construction

need to reinforce sentence construction skill of the grade seven students.

With this reality, the researcher would like to find out the effects of Image to

Sentence Activity Workbook (iSAW) as an intervention material in addressing the

shortage of the learning material and poor basic sentence construction skill of the grade 7

English students. The intervention material will be utilized on the second quarter of

school year 2022-2023 of Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School.

Research Question

This action research aims to determine the effectiveness of the Contextualized

Image to Sentence Activity Workbook (iSAW) for the identified 42 Grade 7 learners of

Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School of the School Year 2022-2023, to help

develop their skills on constructing basic sentences.

Proposed Intervention

The intervention that the researcher intends to apply is the Image to Sentence

Activity Workbook (iSAW). This said intervention is to give access to both English

teachers and grade 7 students of Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School for

adequate and suitable sentence construction instruction material.

the researcher will create the contextualized intervention material iSAW which intends to

have a multimodal front page. The second page will give the MELCs’ least mastered skill

to be addressed and the intervention’s objective, such as: a. Recognize content images or

pictures to formulate basic sentence; b. Construct basic sentence out of the image or

picture, jumbled pictures and given phrases or clauses and; c. Evaluate one’s formulated

basic sentence. The succeeding pages will be on the different activities for sentence

construction: the first activity is on Picture-to-Text, where the students will recognize

pictures or images as the content word of the sentences they need to construct; the next

page is activity two, where there are jumbled tableaus which the students need to arrange

to form meaningful sentences; the next page is activity three, where in pictures/images

together with phrases and/or clauses are shown to let students formulate semantically and

syntactically sentences. The last page is a self-assessment or reflection tool for the

students to evaluate their selves as to the level of their understanding and performance on

the sentence construction skill they will undergo. There will also be a pre-test on the level

of learners’ skill in sentence construction, thus the result will be recorded confidentially.

The second step will be the actual implementation of the project. Once students’

level of performance are identified, the iSAW will be utilized three times a week.

Furthermore, there will six different iSAW for six weeks of the utilization of the

contextualized intervention material.

The last and third step is the post-test of the level of performance of the sentence

construction skill where in the intervention will be assessed in terms of its effectiveness

and during this time there will be a significant improvement or no improvement at all.
 CHAPTER 2

RESEARCH METHODOLOY

Sampling

This action research will utilize purposive sampling. Purposive sampling is a kind

of sampling where respondents are chosen subjectively (Klar & Leeper, 2019).

Participants are learners who are identified through the results of the First Quarter

Examination of Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School of the School Year

2022-2023. The samples are the 42 learners out of the 52 or the 80% of the whole Grade

7 population who have low sentence construction skill.

This action research will utilized descriptive method of study. Descriptive

Research can be described as a study technique utilized to accurately represent the

current happenings. Descriptive research examines phenomena that appear after receiving

treatment for a while. The behaviours shown in descriptive are already accessible studies.

A researcher must gather the accessible data using many methods, including tests,

questionnaires, interviews, and even observation are examples of research instruments.

Descriptive research's primary objective is to thoroughly characterize the events being

studied (Atmowardoyo, 2018). This action research is descriptive in the sense that it

describes the 42 Grade 7 learners’ level of performance in sentence construction. Further,

this will also describe the effect of iSAW on the learners’ performance on sentence

construction.

Locale of the Study

Division where the researcher is assigned. Before the researcher is assigned in the locale

of the study, the said school is not yet separated and considered as an annex school. In the

year 2020, the school was granted with its School ID, was separated and renamed to

Gerasimo Silva Villegas Sr. National High School (GSVSNHS).

While the school has achieved its milestone, there is a decrease of population

during the in-person classes. Despite the fact the school offered Senior High School, in

which the supposed Grade 10 graduates must prefer to enrol in the offered Senior High

courses, the said learners opted to transfer to other schools which offer tangible and

adequate facilities and equipment.

The school needless to say lacks in so many aspects; this includes the learning

facilities, like classrooms, where it only have three makeshift rooms and four concrete

classrooms. Unfortunately, two out of the three makeshifts room were devastated and

fully dilapidated by the typhoon Odette on the year 2021. Moreover, all the classrooms’

things and supplies including the Self Learning Module (SLM) and Textbooks were also

ruined by the catastrophe. Disabling the said school to produce and print another set of

SLM to be used by the learners, instead the school choose more important and more

urgent challenges to be addressed for the in-person classes.

Data Gathering Methods

Pre Administration of Tool. The researcher will craft a test questionnaire which

will focus on the sentence construction competency. The questionnaire will consist of 10

items and will undergo content validation by three experts of the Division of Guihulnagn
City. One of the experts will be the EPS in English of Guihulngan City Division. The

next expert is one of the Master Teacher in English of Guihulngan City Division. The

third expert will be the Cluster English Coordinator of Guihulngan City Division. After

the approval of the said questionnaire, the researcher will orient the participants on how

to answer the test.

During Administration of Tool. The researcher will distribute the questionnaire

to the participants wherein the participants will try to construct basic sentences according

to given patterns. The participants will only be given two (2) minutes per item to answer

each question a total of 20 minutes for the whole questionnaire. This will be done in-

person and inside the classroom.

After Administration of Tool. After the allotted time given to the participants,

the researcher will collect the answered test questionnaires. The test questionnaires will

be coded with the numbers, starting from 1 up to 42. In this manner, the confidentiality of

the test results will be ensured.

The researcher then will formulate a contextualized intervention through iSAW

with emphasis on the questions that most of the students got a wrong answer. The iSAW

will focus on the top 3 sentence pattern construction that needs immediate intervention.

Plan for Data Analysis

The data will be analysed using simple mean. Mean is the simple mathematical

average of a set of two or more numbers (Hayes, 2022). The test questionnaire is a self-

crafted made by the researcher. This test questionnaire follows 10 items of the top 5
sentence pattern, wherein each item will be analyzed through item analysis, percenatges

and average weighted mean.

The researcher will use the iSAW to enhance the performance level of Grade V

pupils was determined using the frequency counts, percentages and average weighted

mean. A 40-test items pretest and posttest were administered. The mean ratings of

teachers who assess the validity of the SIM and test items were computed separately and

their average was obtained. Only the averages are presented in this paper. The items were

assigned the following points: Very Highly Useful (VHU)/ Excellent (4.21 – 5.00);

Highly Useful (HU)/ Very Good (3:41 - 4:20); Moderately Useful (MU)/ Good (2:61 -

3:40); Slightly Useful (SU)/ Fair (1:81 - 2:60); Not Useful (NU)/ Needs Improvement

(1:00 - 1:80).

The results were tabulated and determined as the significant improvement noted on the

performance of the Grave V pupils before and after using the proposed.