Assessing the use of Noun Phrases in Students’ Journals

This paper examines students’ language performance through written journals. The study was conducted at SEEU (South East European University) in 2012. Assessing learners’ input by using a single method does not always result to language acquisition. Consequently, learners should be exposed to more than one assessing tool. With an effort to enhance learners’ proficiency in English language learning from phrase grammar to higher units significant attention was given to written journals by using complex noun phrases. Learners of English Department find difficult learning the complex noun phrases in isolation. Therefore, written journals are seen as an excellent tool in improving their writing skills. The study was conducted across two semesters. As they have English Syntax course in two semesters, in the first semester learners’ were taught about the pre and post modifiers used with noun phrases. The learners reviewed and practiced all noun modifier types. Basically they were working only on sentence level, whereas in the second semester the learners were asked to integrate their phrase level into written context. The study involved 30 subjects of third year students from the English Department, Faculty of Languages Cultures and Communication. Frequency analysis of the written samples was applied to analyze the results (Ellis and Barkhuizen, 2005). The results of the study helped to identify the most and less frequent post modifier types used by the learners.