A Study of the Relationship between Multiple Intelligences & Grammatical Errors
Keywords:
Chinese EFL learners, grammatical errors, multiple intelligencesAbstract
The purposes of the study were : 1) to make surveys on grammatical errors and multiple intelligences of Chinese EFL learners; 2) to explore the possible relationship between grammatical errors and multiple intelligences; 3) to make a comparison between two groups of the learners about the number of errors after receiving two different kinds of instruction – the control group following undifferentiated instruction ignoring the subjects’ conditions of multiple intelligences, and the experiment group receiving instructioncatering to each subject’s composition of multiple intelligences. The subjects were 74 first year students of English major at Guangzhou Automobile College, China, all enrolled in 2009, belonging to two
classes, which was randomly designated as one control group and one experimental group. The method used in the study was quantitative. The study was conducted through data collection by administering of questionnaire, writing task, and error correction test to all the subjects. Then it was followed with data analysis by examination of frequency distributions of multiple intelligences and grammatical errors, bivariate correlation between the multiple intelligences and grammatical errors, and independent-samples
t test on the two groups of subjects. The study found that among the Chinese EFL learners: 1) the most frequently made grammatical errors was the incorrect usage of lexical verbs; 2) the obvious intelligence displayed in strength was intrapersonal intelligence; 3) the most obvious correlation was a negative one found between visual intelligence and article errors; 4) the experimental group obtaining multiple intelligences based instruction performed better in error correction than the control group which followed undifferentiated instruction.
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