Abstract
This research investigated the difficulties of multigrade pupils in learning English language. It identified the profile of the respondents according to sex, parent’s highest educational attainment, exposure to social media, frequency in using English language at home, frequency in reading, and availability of resources/materials at home. Likewise, the extent of difficulties encountered, relationship and differences between the difficulties of multigrade pupils in learning English language in subject-verb agreement, reading comprehension and vocabulary to design an enhancement program. There were 94 multigrade pupils answered the researcher-made questionnaire and 10-item multiple-choice tests for each of the three variables. The statistical tools used were Frequency Count and Percent, Mean and Standard Deviation, Point Biserial Correlation, Spearman Rank Correlation, Pearson Product Moment Correlation, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for Repeated Measures and Bonferroni Post Hoc Test. Study revealed greater male respondents than female, majority of parents belong to elementary level and none had a college degree. Most respondents did not own a gadget, sometimes used English language at home, and give time for reading. However, they only have limited learning resources and materials at home. Furthermore, respondents experienced higher difficulty in subject-verb agreement, reading comprehension and most difficulty in vocabulary. Results showed that there is significant relationship on sex to the extent of difficulties encountered by the pupils in reading comprehension and vocabulary. Males experienced higher difficulties in reading comprehension and vocabulary than females and found out that multigrade pupils experienced higher level of difficulty in vocabulary than in other two competencies. The study concluded that difficulties in subject-verb agreement, reading comprehension and vocabulary were evident in multigrade pupils. Thus, an enhancement program has been proposed to overcome the difficulties encountered in learning English language.
