El orden de los adjetivos en inglés: adaptación de la metodología del rompecabezas en educación primaria

Abstract

The present study examines the positive effects, both quantitative and qualitative, of using the jigsaw methodology applied to learning English as a foreign language among first and second-grade primary education students. This language learning methodology, whose effectiveness has already been tested on secondary education students learning Latin, German, and Spanish, promotes the acquisition of linguistic patterns that help understand, at a basic level, the prototypical behavior of verbal and nominal complementation at syntactic, morphological, and semantic levels. In this research, the methodology has been modified to explain the order of adjectives that complement a noun in. English when the semantic content of one adjective is more objective than the other (e.g., green vs. dark). For the research, two control groups and one experimental group, composed of 42 students respectively, were used, with a quantitative pretest and post-test applied to them. The analysis of the data collected from the tests demonstrates that the application of the jigsaw methodology is effective, as the academic results improved substantially in the experimental group.