The effectiveness of story-telling and grammatical practice in improving Thai students' ability to use the past simple tense: a case study of grade 10 students at Sisaketwittayalai school

The purposes of this study were to determine the effects of story-telling practice and grammatical practice on assisting grade 10 students to learn English past simple tense, and to explore the students’ opinions toward practicing the past simple tense through story-telling and the grammar exercises. The participants were 40 grade 10 students at Sisaketwittayalai School studying English during the first semester of the 2015 academic year. The students were organized into two classes, each contained students each of 20, on using story-telling activities and the other using grammatical practice. Research instruments consisted of the learning material which included five stories containing sentences in the past simple and worksheets, a pre-test, post-test, questionnaire, and interviews. All the students completed the pre-test, were exposed to six hours of practice through the given practices, were provided with vocabulary and grammatical rules relating to past simple tense before practice, and completed the post-test, satisfaction questionnaire, and an interview about their selection of tense for each verb slot in the post-test. The t-test was used for data analysis.
Findings indicated that the both practices, story-telling and grammatical practices, were equally effective in the grade 10 students to learn past simple tense, and the students had positive opinions of the practices. However, some story-telling students said that more time should have been given for this practice.