The Effect of Using a New Inductive Technique on EFL College Students' Use of Punctuation Marks

Abstract

When you speak to other people, you punctuate your speech in many ways. You may pause or change your facial expressions, your tone of voice, or the rhythm of your sentences. This helps listeners to understand you; they can ever ask you a question or get you to repeat something. When you are reading, these verbal and visual clues are not available. The punctuation marks used written English act in the same way as expressions do for speech. Punctuation marks are important because they help to make a sentence have a clearer meaning. It is difficult to understand a sentence without punctuation marks. Besides, a sentence without punctuation marks can also be easily misunderstood.The present study aims at experimentally investigating the effect of using new technique on college students achievement in the course of composition in using punctuation marks . It is hypothesized that there is no statistically difference between the achievement mean score of the students who practice the new technique and that of the students who do not practice this technique in the punctuation posttest. The population of the study is limited to second year students at the ‎Department of English, College of Basic Education , Al-Mustansiryah ‎University for the academic year 2012-2013.The sample consists of 50 students, each of the ‎experimental and control groups consist of 25 students. An experiment lasted for ten days. The t-test for two independent samples was implemented here to compare the mean score of the experimental group and that of the control one in the posttest of achievement. The result shows that there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups in the posttest, because the computed t-value is 1.698 which is less than the tabulated t-value which is 2 .013 the degree of freedom of (48 ) at 0.05 level of significance. This indicates that the new inductive technique is ineffective teaching punctuation marks. At the end, conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions for further studies are put forward.