Report on Grammatical Competence of EFL Learners at Tertiary Level: A Survey at DIU

Abstract

Grammatical competence is defined as the linguistic skill that is necessary for producing language accurately in a given situation. This research is intended to explore the grammatical competence of the students of the tertiary level with special focus on Daffodil International University. In Bangladesh, English is a foreign language and in most of the cases, students remain weak in grammar despite years of learning efforts. For this reason, they fail to write English correctly as students and later as employees. It is the teachers’ responsibility to prepare students in such a way that they become capable of using the English language accurately. In this respect it is important to understand the nature of grammatical competence/incompetence of the students. The present research has been adopted for this purpose. For fact finding, a survey was conducted among the first year first/second semester students of different departments in different campuses of DIU. The opinion of the English language teachers’ were also collected regarding the grammatical competence of the students they teach and some pedagogical issues. Data was collected through questionnaire and analyzed with competent software. Numerical values of students’ grammatical competence were calculated and relative strengths and weaknesses in certain grammatical elements (considered variables) were also measured. Students’ and teachers’ feedbacks were compared with a view to understanding the nature of assessments. The findings of this research could be utilized in developing a need-based syllabus for the students of English at the tertiary level.