The Unit of English Learning of Primary School Children

The Unit of English Learning of Primary School Children

  Primary school students have a strong tendency to remember the meaning of a whole English sentence without knowing its underlying structure and internal constituents. In order to identify from the perspective of the unit of learning how the students perceive language input, the test to compare sentence with word comprehension is administered to the students who are sampled from four grades of a primary school. The sentences used for the test were newly presented ones in the given grade, and the words were selected from the constituents of the same sentences. As a result, the subjects, regardless of their grade, understood the sentences much better than the words in most cases, and sixth graders appeared to have developed their ability to segment the sentences which they had contacted with for more than three years. Consequently, it is suggested that words in their textbooks need to be presented in a phrasal type and the opportunity for the higher graders to segment or chunk sentences into smaller units should be provided through a variety of activities.