1.

0 INTRODUCTION
The issue of teaching English to primary pupils becomes more challenging when it
comes to Grammar. Grammar may be defined as the rules of a language, governing the way
in which words are put together to convey meaning in different contexts. (Chitravelu,
Sithamparam, & Choon, 2007). The teaching of grammar is said to be challenging because it
requires the teachers to explain the rules and concepts explicitly to the pupils in context. When it
involves the explanation of rules, the lesson can sometimes cause boredom among the pupils.
One of the component of Grammar involves preposition. Preposition plays an important role in
language. The use of prepositions in sentences make the messages more informative.
Preposition is defined as a word that shows the relationship between a word in the sentence
and the word that is the object of the preposition. (Nash, 2016). Preposition can be categorized
into preposition of time, place, direction and manner. The learning of preposition sometimes can
be very confusing. Some prepositions have a very close meaning to another.
In this study, the researcher focused on the acquisition of preposition of direction across
and through among year 5 pupils. The research will be conducted to the year 5 pupils in a rural
school. The researcher will implement an intervention that uses Action Song in the teaching of
the preposition across and through. Based on the researchers previous experiences of
teaching at schools during the Practicum, the researcher discovered that many pupils had
problem regarding the preposition across and through. The majority of the pupils whom the
researcher taught were unable to understand the concept of the preposition across and
through. The pupils often misunderstood the meaning of both prepositions across and
through. The researcher felt the need to solve the issue identified.

Therefore, the main

concern of this study is to find out whether the use Action Song is able to improve the
acquisition of the preposition across and through.

1.1 Context of the Study

The researcher is a Semester 7 PISMP TESL teacher trainee in the Teacher Trainee
Institute of Darulaman Campus. One of the major requirements for this programme that she is
undergoing is to prepare an Action Research about an issue in the teaching of English as a
second language for the primary school pupils. In order to fulfil the requirement, the researcher
conducted the action research during her practicum weeks. During the researchers third phase
of practicum, the researcher went to SKSB (pseudonym). It is a small school located in a rural
area.
The school compound is spacious and it has four blocks of buildings consist of
classrooms, an office, teachers rooms, a library, an open hall, a canteen and a preschool.
There is also a meeting room inside the teachers room but it is used as the teachers workplace
because the teachers room cannot accommodate all the teachers. SKSB (pseudonym) is
headed by a headmaster. There are about 400 pupils who are schooling in this school and all of
them are Malays.
The class that the researcher taught was the year 5A. It is the best class for the year 5
pupils. There are 25 pupils in the class. Their level of English language proficiency are ranging
from average to below average. The pupils come from different social economic backgrounds.
Some parents work as farmers, gardeners, lorry drivers, teachers or self-employed. Their
different social economic backgrounds affect their level of English language acquisition. The
pupils who comes from low social economic background have low English language acquisition.
1.2 Reflection on Teaching and Learning Experience
Based on my experience of undergoing two practicum phases at different schools
before, I noticed that most of the pupils had difficulties in understanding and using the English
language. Whenever I asked them questions in English, they usually responded in the Malay

language. They also kept asking me to repeat the instructions in Malay language because they
could not understand English. This problem occurred almost in every school that I entered
during my practicums periods. I tried to help the pupils in understanding the English language
by applying body language while delivering instructions. I believe that body language would help
to pupils to understand the English language better. According to Tai (2014), In English classes,
body language should be frequently used to improve the teaching effectiveness and develop the
students ability. Thus, I applied body language to enhance my teaching process. However, the
pupils were still struggling to understand the English language.
Next, during my practicum periods I realized that the pupils were having difficulty in
differentiating between the prepositions across and through. I noticed that many of them could
not distinguish the use of across and through. This can be seen when I gave them exercises.
Although I have provided them with explanation before, during the practice, they struggled to
answer correctly. As a result, some of them just copied their friends work or totally ignored the
task. They claimed that the exercises were too difficult for them. When I checked their
exercises, I could see their confusion over the prepositions across and through. In the
exercises, answers that should be written with the preposition across were written with the
preposition through and vice versa. In addition, when I conducted whole class discussion, most
of them claimed that it was very difficult to differentiate the two prepositions.
Thus, I decided to conduct this research to improve the year 5 pupils acquisition of
prepositions across and through. This is because it was a frequent problem that I encountered
during my practicums. I felt that this was important to promote understanding of the prepositions
across and through in order to achieve a successful learning. Many of them became confused
about the usage of both prepositions when the English teachers asked them. This made me feel
responsible to come out with an intervention that can improve my teaching of prepositions by
incorporating action song. Songs help to enhance students motivation in learning English. It

offers opportunities for language practice in some skills and language components including
vocabulary. Since songs are interesting, students will be attracted to learn and remember the
lyrics. (Miftahudin, 2015). This emphasizes that action song helps to motivate pupils to learn
English.
A fun drilling with action songs can motivate them and help them to memorize the
prepositions better. It helps them to recognize the difference between the two prepositions.
Importantly, this will be in line with the pedagogical principle where teaching should be fun,
meaningful and purposeful. Apart from learning, they can experience a fun way of learning the
English prepositions that is a key component to acquire English language. Hence, I decided to
do this research to seek improvement for the issue mentioned. This research aimed to answer
the question how can the use of Action Song improve the acquisition of across and through
among the Year 5 pupils?

1.3 Preliminary Data Collection

The data for this action research was collected through observation and document
analysis.
Observation
Cohern (2008) states that observation is a systematic data collection approach. In this
research, observation will be done to the year 5 Arif class. The researcher teaches English
subject to the class. Thus, she has more interaction with the pupils. The researcher can observe
the pupils during her English lesson. Moreover, the data collected through observation is more
reliable as the responds will be authentic and not superficial. Bernard (1994) claims that It
reduces the incidence of "reactivity" or people acting in a certain way when they are aware of
being observed. (Kawulich, 2005). It allows the researcher to see whether the pupils can
understand the prepositions or not. For example, the researcher can observe how they answer
questions related to the prepositions. The use of observation as the preliminary data collection
therefore is suitable to check the pupils level of acquisition before the intervention is used.