Some effects of sentence-combining practice in an ESL program.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of an experimental method of teaching English as a second language. The investigation was designed to discover whether sentence-combining practice would effectively enhance the subordinating ability of intermediate and advanced level college ESL students. An intermediate level group and an advanced level group, each with nine students, participated in an eight week experiment consisting of regular sentence-combining practice. The pre-and post-test instrument used to measure gains was the Test of Ability to Subordinate developed by David M. Davidson. The intermediate group studied six structures of subordination: prenominal adjectives; prepositional and participial phrases; and noun, adverb, and relative clauses. The advanced level group studied, in addition to the above six structures, infinitive phrases. Gains achieved by these groups were compared to those achieved by control groups of eleven advanced students and five intermediate students. Neither of these control groups had studied sentence combining. The gains of the advanced experimental and control groups were compared. In the same manner, the results of the intermediate experimental and control groups were compared. Additionally, the results of the combined experimental groups were compared with those of the combined control groups. The findings demonstrated that both experimental groups made significant gains. The advanced experimental group significantly gained over the advanced control group on six of seven indices of subordinating ability, while the intermediate experimental group also significantly gained over the intermediate control group on five of six indices of subordinating ability. Furthermore, the gains achieved by the combined experimental group significantly exceeded those achieved by the combined control group on six of seven indices of subordinating ability. The study confirms results of earlier studies with native and non-native speakers which found that sentence combining practice effectively enhances student syntactic maturity. The findings further indicate that sentencecombining activity beneficially affects intermediate and advanced ESL college students' ubordinating ability.