LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 21, No. 2, October 2018

LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching

http://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/LLT

Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

157

STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING AND TESTING AS AN APPROACH

TO DEVELOP STUDENTS’ PROFICIENCY ON ENGLISH SENTENCE

STRUCTURE TO PROMOTE AUTONOMOUS LEARNING

Andi Dian Rahmawan and Sri Wiyanah

Universitas PGRI Yogyakarta

andi@upy.ac.id and wiyana.pbiupy@gmail.com

DOI: doi.org/10.24071/llt.2018.210204

Received 9 July 2018; revised 17 September 2018; accepted 29 September 2018

Abstract

This study investigates how Sentence Master downloaded from Android can be

used as a self-study media for students to promote Autonomous Learning to

develop students’ comprehension on English sentence structure which is

grammatically correct. Students can measure, by themselves, whether the material

given during the teaching and learning process has been successfully learned. The

result of this study is also intended to be used by the teachers and lecturers to

indicate the successfulness of teaching and learning that have been conducted.

This is an action research which 10 students of English Education Program of the

University of PGRI Yogyakarta were employed as the objects of the research.

They are tested to run the game of Sentence Master and the score will be recorded

that benefits teacher to consider whether the learning process that has been

conducted is successful. This study also investigates students’ difficulty on

making English sentence. This study emerges results that Sentence Master helps

students to understand English grammar better by employing the smart phone to

promote Autonomous Learning. This media is used by the students as the

indication whether they have the abilities to make good English sentences.

Keywords: autonomous learning, Sentence Master, English sentence structure

Introduction

There are tremendous debates among experts whether English grammar

should be taught explicitly and individually, or should it be taught integrated with

other skills? There are a lot of approaches been found to teach English grammar

to enhance proficiency on making acceptable written English sentences since

decades ago. The question that has not been answered satisfyingly is that, “is it

important to teach English grammar”? Two experts observed in their study that

pre-service teachers show an affirmative attitude towards grammar teaching

although they strongly believe that “it should not be taught directly or overtly.

Attitudes change depending on the age and purpose of the learners”, which “is

also seen that there is a gap between the practice and theory the reason of which

may be the testing policy in Turkish educational system” (Degirmenci & Yavuz,

2015).

mailto:andi@upy.ac.id
mailto:wiyana.pbiupy@gmail.com

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In recent years, people think that “grammar is too important to be ignored.

The newest issue is not whether or not we should teach grammar. The issues now

center on questions, such as which grammar items do learners need most? How do

we go about teaching grammar items in the most effective way? Are they best

taught inductively or deductively?” (Richards & Renandya, 2002). In other words,

how should we teach grammar to our students?

Teaching and learning nowadays have reached the highest level of thinking in

which students are engaged to autonomous learning, which means students have

full responsibility to provide and learn the material and elaborate among

themselves to gain the learning goals effectively and efficiently. In traditional

teaching method, teachers are expected to have 4 basic skill (Jana & Pamungkas,

2018). The skills include pedagogical, character, social and professional. These

skills will meet the expectation of teacher and learners during a teacher-centered

classroom. However, do these teacher’s basic skills are required during an

autonomous learning when students are fully engaged to technology to ‘substitute’

the existence of the teacher?

This study investigates how android app can be used as a self-assessment

conducted by the students to measure their level of proficiency on making English

sentences which are structurally acceptable. It is hoped that this study will emerge

students’ independency on learning English grammar, especially on making

English sentences as it is an expected level of proficiency at the university level.

English Grammar

If you ask average speakers of a language what they know about grammar

they may remember the odd lesson from school, but beyond that they will say that

they have forgotten what grammar they once new (Harmer, 1991). In the sentence

of ‘How many students are there in the classroom?’, the function was enquiring

about numbers, and in the practice which helped the learners use the structure

meaningfully, they asked each other questions about hidden items. No mention

was made of grammar. But there is an important grammar’s point embedded in

that structure; it is countable versus uncountable. In a grammar lesson, the teacher

will draw attention to that distinction. Practice of how many? (countable) will be

contrasted with how much? (of uncountable items). The teacher’s concern will not

be with communication and mastery of a useful structure, rather it will be with

understanding of the concept and mastery of that grammar point. There would be

special attention to any clash between the mother tongue and the target language

in terms of what is countable (Cross: 1992). Some teachers see no need to teach

and practice grammar at all. Some even regard structure practice and other forms

of grammar teaching as harmful. Their view is that learners will pick up the

regularities intuitively.

Talking about English grammar, as a teacher of it, it is our consideration and

responsibility to teach English grammar creatively and contextually which should

be based on the needs. It should be so since a lot of students may have various

perspectives about teaching and learning English grammar. The question is, does

teaching and learning grammar really matter? The grammatical rules provide a

structure to learning any language, both FLT and SLT. However, the teachers in

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the final year of general education are no longer fixated on grammar. It is hardly

mentioned in the curriculum because students are supposed to have learned it in

the first four years of general education. They only focus on grammar when there

are recurrent mistakes made by the students. The students ought to be able to

apply the rules; they are no longer required to actually know them because they

should already be internalized. (Vooren, Casteleyn, & Mottart, 2012).

Learning Autonomously

Learner autonomy in language education is interpreted in various ways and

various terms such as ‘learner independence’, ‘self-direction’, and ‘independent

learning’ (Little, 1991); (Karababa, Eker, Serkan, & Ar, 2010). Those concepts

are used simultaneously to refer to the same object called as autonomous learning.

When the students are able to direct the learning process by themselves, what is

the role of the teachers? (Masouleh & Jooneghani, 2012) investigate the role of

the teacher in autonomous learning. The investigation reveals a belief that to help

learners to assume greater control over their own learning, it is important that

teachers help them to become aware of and identify the strategies that they already

use or could potentially use. The study highlights the need to integrate learner

independence into the language curriculum, with a well structured focus, delivery

and content. Holec (1979) as cited by (Okumu, 2015) describes an autonomous

learner in various aspects. An autonomous learner is capable of:

1. Determining the objectives
2. Defining the contents and progressions
3. Selecting method and techniques to be used
4. Monitoring the procedure of acquisition
5. And evaluating what has been acquired
A teacher has prepared a lot of things before he comes to the class. Is the

autonomous learning possible to happen?

Should the autonomous learning be designed strictly to the norms or ethics?

Or can it be arranged through games to draw more attention of the learners? A

study has been conducted that games may attract more attention among the high

anxiety of the young learners (Celik, 2013). It is true that, when students are

learning to acquire the correct English sounds, they should have good

concentration. Games will certainly make them spontaneously using their L1. In

this case, games will omit the anxiety and raise the motivation to learn English.

Generally speaking, motivation leads to the autonomy in learning (Vile &

Buyukduman, 2013); (Egel, 2009). It has the meaning that, before actuating the

autonomous learning, students and teachers should grow the intrinsic motivation

of learning English because it is strongly connected to the autonomy

(Daskalovska, Koleva, & Ivanovska, 2012); (Dincer, Yesilyurt, & Takkac, 2012).

As it has been stated, the 3 most important things to gain the best result are

language, learning motivational and the use of technology (Ali, Soleimani, &

Bakhtiarvand, 2014).

Autonomous learning also has strong relationship with E-learning to diminish

the distance between teacher and students (Cai, 2012). When teacher employs E-

learning, it is benefited that students will have opportunity to gain abundant of

material that can be easily accessed at anytime and anywhere. The vast

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development of technologies urges the modification of learning and teaching

approaches to gain the better results (Goulao & Menedez, 2015). (Farivar &

Rahimi, 2015) proves that experimental group autonomy which employs the

CALL brings the better results on English test than the control group which does

not apply CALL. The reason is that CALL provides abundant material for all

aspects of English learning, compared to the traditional teaching and learning

method.

Is it only the teacher as the one who should create the autonomous learning

environment? Are there others elements that can take participation during the

conducting of this learning approach? Autonomous learning has the meaning of

making the environments, not just the one in the classroom, more than that, the

students should be able to feel the supports from society to apply the autonomous

learning. The university or the school should support by providing good facilities

and the contexts of learning such as a good library that provides anything to learn

that can be accessed through inside and outside the library building as away to

develop the students’ learning independence which happens not only in one night

(Chou & ChanLin, 2015); (Hamdi, 2016); (Laz, 2013); (Ivanovska, 2015).

The main aim of learning a language is to be able to communicate with others

using that language, actively and spontaneously. In this case, students are

expected to learn the language, not only from teachers at classrooms,

independently to gain more results. The students are also expected to be

responsible for the conceptual, motivational and content-technological (Popescu,

2014); (Bolsunovskaya, Kemerova, Asadullina, Sentsov, & Chris, 2015).

Teachers’ duty is to make supportive autonomous learning; students are

responsible about the process of learning (Ismail & Yusof, 2012). A teacher

should be able to make himself as a partner for the students, meaning that he

observes, listens, analyzes and inform when the problem emerges (Cristina, 2015).

Besides, it is the teacher’s duty to make the students realize their real needs to

accomplish the purposes and to grow the motivation environment to gain the

learning goals effectively and efficiently (Alhodiry, 2016). On the other hand, the

students are expected to find suitable materials based on teachers’ direction, state

the learning goals and responsible for the assessments (Tran & Duong, 2018).

Method

This research employs 10 students consisting of 7 males and 3 females of the

third year students in the University of PGRI Yogyakarta specialized on English

Teacher Training Program. The subjects of this study are asked to download the

app of Sentence Master from their android phones. Those 10 students have joined

basic structure, pre-intermediate, intermediate structure, and now they are joining

Advanced Structure as the last step to be proficient in English grammar. During

the process of data gaining, students are introduced to the level of the game,

starting from the beginner, competent, professional and expert. They are expected

to start the game with the beginner level as a way to know the game better. In the

end, students will be able to finish all the levels without any obstacles, in which it

indicates that the learning process of grammar is successfully conducted. The

score of each subject of the research will be recorded to measure the ability to

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make English sentences, after that, they are expected to answer a series of

question in a provided questionnaire regarding their experiences during joining

the class of grammar.

Findings and Discussion

This research focuses on how Sentence Master of Android App can be a

media for students of English learning to measure their capability to make English

sentences. The students are expected to use the Sentence Master to reveal their

real capabilities on making English sentences which are structurally correct. The

samples of Sentence Master are described as follows:

1. Change have ? do you Schedule

2. Like I don’t food Thai

3. Very well paints she

4. Your what is ? address

5. Of the order elevator out is

6. Cold liked no one the pizza

This is a kind of grammatical language game, in which the students are asked to

re-arrange the jumbled words to be a good grammatical sentence. There are 4

levels of difficulty which can be used as a parameter, in what the level the

students are at the best. The principles of this game are:

1. Students choose the expected level of difficulty.
2. Students are expected to be able to arrange the jumbled words to be the

grammatically accepted sentence.

3. The ability to make grammatical sentences is fully based on the level of
comprehension on the word order.

4. When the students are able to get the high score, it means that the better
comprehension after the learning process has been achieved.

5. By recording the score of each student in a class, teacher will get benefit that
he or she can measure his successfulness on delivering material that is the

English word order.

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6. The measurement can be used by the teacher to fix the weak parts, both the
material and the way to deliver it.

7. When the teacher is successful to measure the process and result of the
learning process, it is expected that the future learning process will achieve the

goals effectively and efficiently.

After the students played the game of Sentence Master, the researcher gained the

data of the students’ scores which are presented in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Students’ Scores

Respondent The Sentences
Total

Mistakes

Time

Spent

Student 1

1. Mike always goes to work by car. 0 11.50’

2. Matt is studying to be a boat captain. 0 21.37’

3. Only after the fact did he realize his

mistake.

1 19.37’

4. More than seven-hundred farm animals

were destroyed.

0 17.38’

5. What would you do with so much

money?

0 31.90’

6. I hope that he comes tomorrow. 5 26.20’

7. Our program was better than was

expected.

2 16.42’

8. When did you return from Madrid? 2 11.41’

9. Listen now as Dizzy Gillespie and his all

star quintet play the song.

3 39.69’

10. It represents the special relationship

between the circus animals and the human

performers.

4 46.21’

Student 2

1. When are you completing the computer

course?

5 18.58’

2. Did you put the milk in the refrigerator? 4 22,74’

3. He does not attend a high school. 1 25.81’

4. We do this more for pleasure than for

money.

4 24.16’

5. He asked me how to use the program. 4 31.18’

6. Jack does not need to sleep very much. 5 15.96’

7. Soon after, music was added to his

words.

4 16.53’

8. How happy are you that John is coming? 2 26.33’

9. When the snow melted, the flowers began

to appear.

5 19.46’

10. The cinema is next to the park. 4 24.57’

Student 3

1. He is more likely to go than to stay. 2 20.12’

2. I brush my teeth in the morning. 0 7.43’

3. If I had a car I would drive to work. 5 35.83’

4. She liked the dark blue sweater the best. 3 25.50’

5. May I have a word with you? 1 15.73’

6. My sister goes to work at 8 o’clock. 2 12.57’

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Respondent The Sentences
Total

Mistakes

Time

Spent

7. Her legs felt as she climbed the stairs. 0 11.00’

8. What do you think of him? 0 8.35’

9. His mom made sure that Carl finished

school.

1 17.36’

10. The cinema is next to the park. 3 16.14’

Student 4

1. There are six of us at home. 0 10.06’

2. You should see a play while in London. 1 21.82’

3. The live in the centre of town. 0 7.73’

4. He is more likely to go than to stay. 0 12.51’

5. Matt is studying to be a boat captain. 0 18.57’

6. They live in the center of town. 0 7.73’

7. I did not turn off the stove in the kitchen. 0 18.11’

8. Mike always goes to work by car. 0 11.97’

9. He does not attend a high school. 0 8.80’

10. What is your favorite car? 0 7.00’

Student 5

1. The Ebola virus affects animal and

people.

0 9.48’

2. What would you do with so much

money?

1 20.66’

3. How happy are you that John is coming? 5 21.66’

4. May I have a word with you? 0 12.49’

5. When the snow melted, the flowers began

to appear.

4 16.38’

6. My sister goes to work at eight o’clock. 1 13.63’

7. He is considered the world’s first music

star.

2 23.03’

8. I hope that he comes to the party

tomorrow.

1 16.45’

9. How much money can you earn? 5 19.31’

10. Jack does not need to sleep very much. 3 23.61’

Student 6

1. What do you think of him? 1 8.41’

2. When did you return from Madrid? 0 12.14’

3. May I have a word with you? 0 15.11’

4. If I had a car I would drive to work. 0 23.54’

5. My father has suggested that I change

my job.

0 19.60’

6. Jack does not need to sleep very much. 1 13.27’

7. Mike always goes to work by car. 0 9.28’

8. They live in the center of town. 0 9.65’

9. Do you have anything to eat? 0 7.19’

10. I brush my teeth in the morning 0 9.51’

Student 7

1. I didn’t turn off the stove in the kitchen 0 12.78’

2. Our program was better than was

expected.

0 11.63’

3. Do you have anything to eat? 0 12.76’

4. If I had a car I would drive to work 5 28.33’

5. How far is Houston from here? 1 16.99’

6. I brush my teeth in the morning. 0 7.36’

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Respondent The Sentences
Total

Mistakes

Time

Spent

7. Does your husband have a boring job? 0 11.27’

8. There are six of us at home. 1 15.75’

9. Her legs felt weak as she climbed the

stairs.

2 25.17’

10. She liked the dark blue sweater the best. 3 18.82’

Student 8

1. Did you put the milk in the refrigerator? 0 14.01’

2. Mike always goes to work by car. 0 14.07’

3. She Liked the dark blue sweater the best 3 43.50’

4. Our progress was better than was

expected.

1 20.81’

5. It will harm crops, animal and fish. 0 12.41’

6. More than seven-hundred farm animals

were also destroyed.

4 27.05’

7. If I had a car I would drive to work. 3 41.21’

8. How happy are you that John is coming? 3 18.18’

9. I wonder which dog he said you chased. 1 23.61’

10. My sister goes to work at eight o’clock. 0 17.99’

Student 9

1. Do you know where he lives? 0 7.78’

2. How far is Houston from here? 1 8.73’

3. We do this more for pleasure than for

money.

3 25.00’

4. Matt is studying to be a boat captain. 1 10.95’

5. Jack does not need to sleep very much. 0 7.62’

6. When are you completing the computer

course?

3 14.82’

7. The showing of the program seemed to

impress people.

4 27.28’

8. I knew who would come to the party. 3 15.53’

9. I brush my teeth in the morning. 0 7.35’

10. Can I have a cup of black tea please? 2 20.80’

Student 10

1. I am going to Europe the day I graduate. 4 18.58’

2. You should see a play while in London. 4 23.51’

3. He does not attend a high school. 0 9.22’

4. What do you think of him? 0 6.31’

5. He asked me how to use the program. 0 13.00’

6. There is a dog and a cat here. 0 9.75’

7. Forest fires begin every summer in the

western United States.

5 30.70’

8. Did you put the milk in the refrigerator? 0 7.05’

9. Her legs felt weak as she climbed the

stairs.

5 21.37’

10. The scientists will carry out more

digging next summer.

2 18.95’

There are 100 sentences that are used as the research data, taken from 10

students that we use as the respondents of this research. Those 100 sentences are

going to be used as the parameter which indicates which kinds of sentences are

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difficult for most of the students to construct to be grammatically accepted. We

considered that sentences which spent more time and more mistakes are the

sentences that difficult to construct. The easy sentence construction should spend

no more than 15 seconds which has 1 tolerable mistake. In these categorizations,

we employed 4 kinds of sentences; those are simple, compound, complex and

compound complex sentences. According to those criteria, here we present the

sentences that are difficult to construct by most of the students:

Table 2. Difficult Sentences

The Sentence
Sentence