PEMARKAHAN

KRL 3033
KAEDAH PENYELIDIKAN DALAM PENDIDIKAN SEKOLAH
RENDAH
TAJUK
LITERATURE REVIEW ON THE STUDY OF
USING SUBJECT VERB AGGREEMENT TABLE TO
OVERCOME SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION PROBLEM IN
PRIMARY SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASSES

DISEDIAKAN OLEH
NAMA

NO MATRIK

NAMA TUTOR E-LEARNING :

KUMPULAN UPSI :
TARIKH PENYERAHAN :

Table of content
1

PROGRAM

Page
1. Introduction

2. Syntactic Theory

3. Psycholinguistics

4. Study of Subject-Verb Agreement

4-7

5. Summary

Literature Review
2

Introduction
A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to
my selected area of study. The review should describe, summarized, evaluate and clarify this
literature. It should give a theoretical base for the research and help me determine the nature of
my research. Works which are irrelevant should be discarded and those which are peripheral
should be looked at critically .In this research I am going to use Subject Verb Agreement method
in order to overcome my students problem in building a correct sentence. There are some
articles, journal and research that I referred to as the materials for my studies. This information
hopefully will give me better understanding and clear view in order to seek the truth about the
real problem of children writing. Students need to clearly write what they want to convey in
order to transmit their messages effectively to the receiver. In other words, choices of words and
correct grammatical rules need to be employed by them. However, these students of L2 (a
language which is not a native language in a country but, it is widely used as a medium of
communication) in the researchers class have difficulties in constructing correct sentences in
English. This is because they have problems in the subject-verb agreement rules. These students
have problems in subject-verb agreement because in their L1 (generally a persons mother
tongue or the language acquired first) which is Bahasa Malaysia, it doesnt have rules regarding
subject-verb agreement. Thats why majority of learners have problems in their writing.

Syntactic theory
Syntactic provide a rich array of representational assumptions about linguistic knowledge
and processes. Such detailed and independently motivated constraints on grammatical
knowledge ought to play a role in sentence comprehension. However most grammar based
explanations of processing difficulty in the literature have attempted to use grammatical
representations and processes per se to explain processing difficulty. They did not take into
account that the description of higher cognition in mind and brain encompasses two levels: on
the one hand, at the macro level, symbolic computation is performed, and on the other hand, at
the micro level, computation is achieved through processes within a dynamical system. One
critical question is therefore how linguistic theory and dynamical systems can be unified to
provide an explanation for processing effects.
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Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics assesses difficulties in sentence processing by means of several
quantitative measures. There are global measures such as reading times of whole sentences or
accuracies in grammaticality judgment tasks which provide metrics for overall language
complexity on the one hand (Traxler and Gernsbacher 2006; Gibson 1998), and online measures
such as fixation durations in eye-tracking experiments or voltage deflections in the event-related
brain potential (ERP) paradigm on the other hand (Traxler and Gernsbacher 2006; Osterhout et
al. 1994; Frisch et al. 2002). To explain the cognitive computations during sentence
comprehension, theoretical and computational linguistics have developed qualitative symbolic
descriptions for grammatical representations using methods from formal language and automata
theory (Hopcroft and Ullman 1979).
Study of Subject-Verb Agreement: From Novice Writers to Expert Writers
By : Surina Nayan
August 2009
Academy of Language Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis
02600, Arau Perlis, Malaysia
Writing involves constructing sentences correctly. Therefore, in English for students to
effectively communicate their ideas well in writing, they must be able to construct meaningful
sentences that have correct grammar. Dorn (2000) states that the sentences created by words and
phrases are the essential blocks of meaning that allow us to communicate thoughts. If there are
not constructed carefully, they can make reading difficult. He further states that major basic
usage and grammar slips in written English are those associated with verbs. Based on the fact
that subject-verb agreement area is very important to express ideas especially in writing, where
non-verbal communication is absent, the students really need to master this rule in order to write
effectively. As a result, they can convey their message clearly and effectively. By writing a piece
of work that is error free, it shows that learners have mastered the English grammar rules and it

will give a good impression to others who read their work. Subject verb, mainly on semantic
level and syntactic level. In detail as follows:

Semantic level It is concerned with inappropriate choices of tense, aspect, voice or mood.
E.g.,
the subject-verb pair recognition is correct, but the verb form does not agree with the context on
the semantic level. Such as, He *ate some bread for his breakfast. The predicate verb ate is in
past tense, it agrees with the subject on sentence level. But if its context features need it to be in
future tense, the verb form will have to be modified. Here, the checking is only done on syntactic
level without considering the context.

Syntactic level As the second type, it can be subdivided into two sub-classes:
(1) Too many modifiers in the sentence may disturb the dependency parsing and phrase syntactic
parsing. E.g., The under *frame, the tension *spring, the swing *arm and the tensile force
constant *device are all equipped in the protecting cover.
Dependency Grammar Based English Subject-Verb and Agreement Evaluation1
By : Dongfeng Cai , Yonghua Hu , Xuelei Miao and Yan Song
November 2010
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
City University of Hong Kong
83 Tat Chee Ave, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Sentence simplification is an interesting point in this paper. Grefenstette (1998) applies shallow
parsing and simplification rules to the problem of telegraphic text reduction, with as goal the
development of an audio scanner for the blind or for people using their sight for other tasks like
driving. Another related application area is the shorting of text to fit the screen of mobile devices
(Corston-Oliver, 2001; Euler 2002). We employ the sentence simplification as a pre-processing
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operation by deleting some kinds of adjective, adverb, modified noun and some kind
prepositional phrase, so that the sentence becomes more simple with the trunk elements, such as
the subject, the verbs and the object, left. By analyzing the training data, a positive simplification
categories set is picked out .

Stromswold, Why Children Understand and Misunderstand Sentences 1

An Eye-tracking Study of Passive Sentences*
Karin Stromswold
ABSTRACT
Although by 3- or 4-years of age, children are remarkably good at understanding most
sentences, many studies have shown that even 5- and 6-year old children have difficulty
understanding some types of sentences. The reason(s) why are unclear in large part because we
know little about how children process sentences. To investigate how children process the
sentences, we collected accuracy, reaction time, and eye-gaze data while 3- to 6-year old
English-speaking children listened to active and passive sentences and performed a picturematching comprehension task. Consistent with previous work, children were faster and more
accurate on active than passive sentences. Our data suggest that, although 3-year old children
have (at least some of) the linguistic machinery that underlies passives, they cannot interpret
them, and even 6-year old childrens processing of passives is not yet adult-like insomuch as it is
off-line. Our data further suggest that at age 5, children still rely on a 1st NP = Agent heuristic to
process active and passive sentences, but that by age 6, children only use the 1st NP = Agent
heuristic when they misinterpret passives. Thus, we argue that children misinterpret passives, not
because of syntactic limitations, but rather because of sentence processing limitations. More
generally, we argue that childrens sentence processing is still developing at age 6. For several
reasons, passive sentences are an ideal test case for investigating how childrens grammars and
language processors develop. First, we know a great deal about what features makes passives
easier and harder for children to understand. Second, because 6-year old children continue to
have difficulty understanding passives, we can study how childrens sentence processing
develops over a relatively long period of time. Third, it is easy to tell when children
misunderstand passives because the meanings of active and passive sentences are very different.
Fourth, passives are well studied linguistically. Fifth, although passive are rarer than actives,
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passives are not a fringe part of language cross-linguistically or within English (i.e., they arent
like Englishs respectively construction, e.g., John and Mary got a B and an A, respectively).
Lastly, the structural characteristics of passives differ from language to language and this means
children must learn how passives are formed in their language. Subject-verb agreement is a
complicated and difficult problem in Machine Translation. Evaluation, it is involved with
complicated grammar, long dependency relationship, and subordinate clause factors, and so on.
Especially for the science and technology literature sentences, such as patent corpus, which are
too long or with too many modifiers in, it gets worse. We have proposed a hybrid method for
subject-verb agreement evaluation on dependency grammars with the processing of phrase
syntactic parsing and sentence simplification for subject-verb discovery. It is completely
automatically done, and the results show its efficiency. By the way, the categories we use for
sentence simplification and wh-type subject reverting operation may be not much appropriate,
the better categories are made, the better the system performs.

Summary
Children need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the
tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their writing. This is to ensure that
they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply
rules regarding sentence structures, grammar and also its mechanic that refers to punctuation and
capitalization. However, many of the pupils have problems in applying these rules in their
writing even though they have been learning English for about 12 years in school. The researcher
gathered information for this study through their observation, interview and written assignment
given to students. The findings from the study are of significant important since this will help the
teacher to further enhance their teaching methods and find ways to help students improve their
writing and avoid making errors in subject-verb agreement as possible. Based on my
observation, I noticed that my students have mistaken in these both general and sub-rules of
subject-verb agreement in their writing. The researcher tried to investigate the difficulties in the
use of subject-verb agreement in their writing and also to determine remedial actions that need to
be taken in order to overcome their difficulties in using subject-verb agreement correctly in their
written performance.