Level of Self-Esteem and Grammatical Competence in English among Fatima National High School Senior High School Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Students nowadays are frequently exposed to different opportunities to write and speak for different purposes. With this, failure to meet one of the many expectations of the audience which includes grammatical competence may affect their self-esteem. Grammatical competence is an important aspect of English language proficiency since it can let students write, read, and speak with greater confidence. On the other hand, high self-esteem is important to students since it motivates them to achieve their goals and better cope with different circumstances while low self-esteem leads to further isolation. Problems in self-esteem is one of the psychological concerns in all students. With this, the researchers would like to evaluate the grammatical competence of the students of Fatima National High School and find out the possible link to their self-esteem.

METHODS

Descriptive-correlation method was used in the study. A total of 304 students in the academic track were identified as the respondents through simple random sampling. Questionnaires used were adapted from Rubino (2016) for the evaluation of self-esteem and evaluation of grammatical competence was developed and validated to test the grammatical competence. Weighted arithmetic mean and frequency distribution was used to test the variables. To measure the degree of correlation, r and p values were obtained

RESULTS

A total of 173 respondents participated in the study. It was perceived in the evaluation of the level of self-esteem that the students sometimes (WM: 3.67) have high and healthy self-esteem as assessed. On the other hand, grammatical competence was tested where it was shown that the majority of the students are on the fair skill level (61.85%).The mean of theindividual variables was correlated and it was shown that there is a high negative correlation (r=0.023) and insignificant relationship (p=0.76) between grammatical competence and level of self-esteem.

DISCUSSIONS

It has been depicted that the grammatical competence does not affect the self-esteem (p=0.76). This may be because self-esteem is mainly the product of the different personalities and has no link to grammatical competence. It is also suggested that further study is conducted where verbal communication skills will be assessed aside from the paper-and-pencil test for determining grammatical competence.