Enhancing Grammatical Competence through Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures: A Quasi-Experimental Study among Hospitality Management Students

Grammatical competence is essential to effective professional communication in Hospitality Management, yet tertiary grammar instruction often remains dominated by decontextualized and rule-based practices that may not sufficiently support students’ communicative needs. This study examined the effectiveness of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in improving the grammatical competence of first-year Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management students compared with conventional instruction. Using a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design, the study involved 54 students from North Eastern Mindanao State University, Tandag Campus, with 27 participants in the control group and 27 in the experimental group. The instructional implementation covered 15 hours across 10 sessions, including the pretest, four grammar instructional modules, and the posttest. A 100-item grammatical competence test assessed students’ performance in pronoun–antecedent agreement, subject–verb agreement, tenses of verbs, and voices of verbs. Data were analyzed using means, standard deviations, independent-samples t-tests, paired-samples t-tests, and gain-score analysis. Pretest results showed no significant differences between the control and experimental groups across the four grammatical domains, indicating comparable baseline performance, with t-values ranging from 0.20 to 1.33 and p-values from .362 to .842. Posttest results significantly favored the experimental group in pronoun–antecedent agreement, t = 15.17, p