EFFECTS OF SENTENCE-COMBINING PRACTICE ON
LINGUISTIC MATURITY LEVEL OF ADULT STUDENTS
E. M. MULDER
CARL BRAUN
WILLIAM G. HOLLIDAY
JOAN
ABSTRACT
This study investigated the effect of sentence-combining practice on
adult writing. It was hypothesized that those adults who practiced sentence
manipulation would combine groups of short sentences and write compositions syntactically different from those written by similar students not exposed to such sentence-combining practice. Thirty-eight females who
enrolled in an occupational training program served as the experimental
and control groups. The experimental group was involved in sentencecombining activities for 12 hours over a six-week period (plus 28 hours of
regular instruction) while the control group spent 40 hours on the regular
curriculum. As predicted, findings indicated that the experimental group
increased significantly in their ability to write more mature sentences, as
evidenced by T-unit length and, secondarily, by number of sentence
transformations.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this study was to determine whether adult students pracand embedding short sentences scored significantly higher
than a control group in terms of two linguistic characteristics of studentgenerated sentences. These linguistic characteristics included the mean
number of words per T-unit and, of secondary importance, the number of
selected sentence transformations. These two dependent variables were
evaluated using narrative and expository modes of discourse and under controlled and free-writing conditions.
ticing combining
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Syntactic Maturity and Linguistic Measurements. English instructors have
long been aware that the study of traditional grammar has an apparent lack
of transfer to most aspects of composition. Supportive empirical studies
(2:37-38) have commonly concluded that the &dquo;teaching of formal grammar
E. M. MULDER is an instructor at the Alberta Vocational Centre in Calgary, Alberta.
CARL BRAUN is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Calgary, Alberta.
WILLIAM G. HOLLIDAY is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, The University
of Calgary, Alberta.
JOAN
111
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112
effect on the improvement of writing.&dquo; Thus many
negligible
educators
have
English
begun to study alternative solutions to this problem.
transformational
Chomsky’s
grammar theory (6) probably represents the most
to
this
instructional
problem in English. This approach
popular approach
stresses the generation or building of sentences rather than the traditional
method of analyzing existing sentences.
One of the chief contributing factors to facilitate the growing interest in
transformational studies was the development of improved linguistic indices.
Hunt’s (11) study is of particular note. He measured syntactic maturity using
1000 writing samples of fourth, eighth and twelfth graders, and of skilled
has
a
...
adults. He concluded that the &dquo;T-unit,&dquo; which was a modified form of two
earlier units (Loban’s &dquo;communication unit&dquo; [15], and Strickland’s
&dquo;phonological unit&dquo; [24] ), constituted the most accurate measure relative to
other studied indices. Thus he developed the concept of the &dquo;T-unit,&dquo; defined
contains one main clause
whose total length
(11:20) as &dquo;that unit
with all the subordinate clauses attached to it. The number of subordinate
clauses can be none.&dquo; In other words, segmenting a passage into T-units
would be the same as dividing this passage into the fewest number of possible
sentences. Any complex or simple sentence would constitute one T-unit, but
any compound or compound-complex sentence would consist of two or more
T-units. Subsequent research by Braun (3) and O’Donnell et al. (20) has
documented the T-unit as a valid indicator of development in syntactic
...
...
maturity.
Hunt (12) conducted a laboratory-like experiment under closely controlled
writing conditions that was designed to study more precisely the processes
described in the earlier studies of linguistic measurement. Hunt stated
(13:113) that his controlled writing instrument &dquo;is now sufficiently wellestablished that it could be used by other researchers as a quick and easy way
of testing certain aspects of syntactic maturity that otherwise would require a
much longer period to test.&dquo; This testing instrument directs the student to
combine 32 simple sentences. As a result, Hunt could control what the writer
states, but not how he expresses
it,
so
that there
are no
differences due
to con-
subject matter. The most comprehensive finding in his experiment was
the same as that of the earlier free-writing experiments: as school children get
older they tend to embed a larger number of reduced sentences inside a main
clause; consequently, the average number of words per T-unit increases.
Hunt (11) also concluded that as students become older they write
sentences with an increasing number of transforms; that is, sentences into
tent or
which have been combined a greater number of ideas that could have been
expressed in simple or kernel sentences. Further, he found that those transformations which expanded the nominal (i.e., noun type) structures were
especially indicative of maturity. Other researchers (3) (20) corroborated
Hunt’s findings on T-unit length and sentence transformations.
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113
Further, Hunt (11) proposed that
a sentence-building program could be
accelerate students’ syntactic development in free writing situations as measured by T-unit length and number of sentence transformations.
The first researcher to develop such a program was Mellon (16). His students
studied basic transformational grammar concepts as a basis for their
sentence-combining problems and achieved more elaborate, mature writing
skills.
Subsequently, O’Hare (21) modified Mellon’s curriculum by eliminating
the teaching of transformational grammar. O’Hare’s students combined the
sentences using learned signals in place of Mellon’s grammar theory. O’Hare
was able to support empirically this curriculum modification. Whereas
Mellon obtained two to three years’ growth in syntactic dexterity within a year
for seventh graders, O’Hare obtained four years’ growth within a year for
students in the same grade.
In addition, the O’Hare (21) and Miller and Ney (17) studies evaluated
written compositions of students taught by this sentence-combining curriculum to determine whether &dquo;better&dquo; writing was attained in accordance
with those standards usually employed by theme graders. These investigators
concluded that sentence-combining practice contributed to general improvement in composition writing.
Finally, Cooper summarized Stotsky’s findings regarding sentencecombining studies by stating:
developed
to
Research ...
[has] convincingly demonstrated that
sentence-combining practice will increase both syntactic
maturity and overall quality in the writing of upper elementary and junior high school students.... [Furthermore] no
other single teaching approach has ever consistently been
shown to have a beneficial effect on syntactic maturity and
writing ability. (7:72)
Those students from grade two to freshman college level who have been exposed to some type of sentence manipulation exercises have shown improvement according to a number of studies (8) (10) (22). Thus, it seemed
reasonable to hypothesize that this same effect would hold true for adults who
are enrolled in occupational training programs.
HYPOTHESES
that adult students practicing combining and emwould score significantly higher than the control
group in terms of eight nested variables. Specifically, the two major criterion
tasks, controlled and free writing conditions, required students to combine
It
was
bedding
hypothesized
short
sentences
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114
in the controlled condition and then write a
in
given topic the free condition. Students were given both
composition
narrative and expository sentences or topics under the separate writing conditions. Furthermore, these four categories were each evaluated in terms of the
number of words per T-unit and the number of sentence transformations per
and embed 32 short
sentences
on a
sentence.
METHODOLOGY
The adult students sampled in this study were enrolled at the
Alberta Vocational Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Forty-nine females
in their fifth month of a commercial English program were randomly
assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The average age in the
groups was twenty-seven and all students had less than a high school diploma.
Procedure and Materials. A pretest-posttest control group design was
employed in the manner described by Campbell and Stanley (4). The experimental group performed sentence-combining activities over a six-week
period (12 hours of sentence-combining plus 28 hours of regular instruction)
while the control group continued working with the regular prescribed curriculum (for a total time of 40 hours). The regular instruction for both groups
was supplied by the head of the English Department at the Centre, with the
sentence-combining instruction being done by the experimenter. Approximately two-thirds of the sentence-combining activities were tightly controlled ; that is, each group of sentences was combined using stated instructions as suggested by O’Hare (21).
The first exercise set required students to master single-embedding problems. For example, the problem:
Subjects.
Peter noticed SOMETHING.
There were nine golf balls in the river
(THAT).
would be solved by combining the two sentences using the capitalized words as
signals. The word &dquo;SOMETHING&dquo; would be replaced by the word &dquo;THAT&dquo;
plus the second sentence. The completed sentence would read: &dquo;Peter noticed
that there were nine golf balls in the river.&dquo;
These single-embedding problem types were followed by a second set of
multiple-embedding exercises which instructed students to transform and
embed two or more kernel sentences into a single sentence. For example:
SOMETHING should tell you SOMETHING.
has not called in five days. (THE FACT
You are not going steady anymore. (THAT)
John
THAT)
These three
sentences would be combined by replacing the first word
&dquo;SOMETHING&dquo; with &dquo;THE FACT THAT&dquo; plus the second sentence. The
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115
second word &dquo;SOMETHING&dquo; would be replaced by the signal word &dquo;THAT&dquo;
plus the third sentence. The problem would be solved by writing &dquo;The fact
that John has not called in five days should tell you that you are not going
&dquo;
steady anymore.&dquo;
Moffett (18) suggested that sentence-combining exercises be tied to larger
composition problems; thus, one period (40 minutes) per week in the present
study was devoted to a freer-writing situation where varying numbers of
kernel sentences were presented for combination into larger units using any
type of transformation that &dquo;sounded right and made sense.&dquo;
Collection and Analysis of Writing Samples. Studies (1) (9) (11) have shown
that a writer’s performance can vary because of day-to-day fluctuations and
&dquo;
because of the mode of discourse. To compensate for these two variables, two
modes of discourse (narrative and expository) were evaluated by sampling
both groups of students’ writings over the same four day period for the pretest
and a subsequent four day period for the posttest.
It was necessary to adopt certain valid indices of language maturity as this
study was concerned with measuring syntactic-linguistic development. Much
recent research in language, especially that of Hunt (11) and O’Donnell et al.
(20), has provided reliable indices of language development. The primary index used in this study was the number of words per T-unit; the secondary index was the number of sentence-combining transformations.
As discussed earlier, Hunt (11) devised the T-unit and found it to be a
reliable device for segmenting language. The segmentation of a passage into
T-units can be illustrated by Hunt’s example of a fourth grader’s one-sentence
theme. Accordingly, each T-unit is numbered:
1.I like the movie we saw about Moby Dick, the
white whale
2. The captain said if you can kill the white whale,
Moby Dick I will give this gold to the one that
can do it
3. And it is worth sixteen dollars (11:21)
After the passages
were
segmented
into T-units in the
manner
described
above, the average number of words per T-unit was calculated by dividing the
number of words which the passage contained by the number of T-units. For
example, if a passage of 208 words contained 20 T-units, the mean T-unit
length would be 10.8 words per T-unit.
The secondary task involved a count of two types of sentence-combining
transformations-nominal and adverbial. The nominal transformations were
those which expanded the noun constructions-fifteen categories were
counted. Adverbial transformation taken into consideration involved both
phrases and clauses - eleven categories were counted. The 15 nominal and 11I
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116
adverbial
nell et al.
categories used in this study were those which Braun (3) and O’Don(20) found to be significant indices of language maturity.
RESULTS
of control and experimental groups was found to
be equivalent
terms of pretest instruments of syntactic maturity, with the
exception of the narrative controlled T-unit length measure. Consequently,
analysis of co-variance was used to evaluate potential gains between groups
associated with this latter measure and found to be statistically significant as
shown in Table 1.
The initial
performance
in
TABLE 1
COMPARISON OF MEAN PRE-POST DIFFERENCE SCORES ON THE
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY FACTORS OF SYNTACTIC
MATURITY FOR FREE AND CONTROLLED WRITING
OF EXPERIMENTAL AND CONTROL GROUPS
(1) F ratio generated by analysis of covariance
(2) P < .O1
for this
comparison only.
(3)P<.05
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117
Seven t-tests were applied to the net change in pre- and posttest scores
between the experimental and control groups and, as predicted, found to be
significant in each case as shown in Table 1. In addition, the pre- and posttest
change scores in the control group were small with the exception of the freewriting sentence transformation measure which alone was significant. Three
students in the experimental group and eight in the control group were
unable to complete their work in the training program, thereby reducing the
total number of subjects from 49 to 38.
DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS AND APPLICABILITY TO ADULT LEARNERS
T-Unit
Length
and Sentence
Transformation
Data
The findings of this study generally indicated that the sentence-combining
exercises used in the experimental group produced a significant increase in
students’ ability to write sentences as judged by T-unit length and, of secondary importance, by the number of sentence transformations.
The experimental group wrote longer T-units than those of the control
group in both controlled and free-writing tests. The controlled writing data
generated by the experimental group is comparable to the normative data
presented by Hunt (12). The experimental group’s pretest compositions in the
present study suggested a level of syntactic maturity similar to that of Hunt’s
&dquo;average adult&dquo; or &dquo;high grade twelve&dquo; subjects. However, the posttest results
indicated that the experimental group’s T-unit length was slightly greater
than that of Hunt’s &dquo;skilled adult&dquo; group, substantiating the effectiveness of
the exercises evaluated in the present study.
The free-writing data for T-unit length was compared with O’Hare’s (21)
data for seventh graders. This study with adult students over a six-week
period showed approximately half the growth rate of O’Hare’s experimental
group over a 32-week period. The data indicated that the experimental subjects in the present study achieved approximately one-half the rate of growth
of O’Hare’s in approximately one-fifth the time when a similar curriculum
was used. Perhaps this substantial growth can be attributed to the fact that
adult subjects were used in this study rather than seventh graders.
The ability of the adult students to benefit from sentence-combining activities in a relatively short period can possibly be explained in part by Hunt’s
statement (12:58) that &dquo;as the mind matures it organizes information more intricately and so can produce and receive more intricately organized
sentences.&dquo; He cited Miller’s theory of &dquo;chunking&dquo; in support of his statement.
Ney (19:160) also stressed the maturation factor. He concluded from his
research in sentence-combining that &dquo;in those cases where students do not
possess the underlying cognitive structures (or are not developmentally ready)
practice has no facilitating effect at all.&dquo; It appears that because the subjects
used in this study were adults, they were able to capitalize on such sentenceDownloaded from aeq.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016
118
combining activities and progress at a faster rate than those seventh graders
used in O’Hare’s study (21).
Secondarily the data collected concerning sentence transformations indicated that the sentence-combining practice increased the adult student’s
ability to embed and combine sentences as illustrated by the sentence
transformation count. However, the negative change experienced by the control group across all writings was largely unexplainable. A tentative explanation can be found in Hunt’s study (11). He found that with school children
under typical classroom conditions (as in his control group) the normal
growth was.7 of one word per T-unit over an eight-month period. If the adult
learners performed similarly to school children, the six-week period of this
study would allow for little, if any &dquo;normal growth.&dquo; Another obvious explanation concerns the effect of different instructors interacting with the experimental and control groups.
Applicability to Adult Learners
The sentence-combining activities used in this study seemed particularly
suited to adults in occupational training and similar programs because these
learners often lack the writing skills and confidence necessary to compose syntactically mature sentences. The structured exercises in sentence-combining
activities which progressed from simple to more complex problems made success more easily attainable. Also, it was feasible for students to attain mastery
(often unheard of in writing exercises) because two-thirds of the experimental
exercises were highly structured in terms of required content and writing instructions.
Research has indicated
relatively impatient
(5) (14) (23)
that the adult students tend
to
be
learners, commonly requiring some direct benefit from
a
classroom instructional situation. This need for reinforcement appears to be
aided by such a sentence-combining program. The student’s initial syntactic
position as measured by T-unit length could be ascertained by having him
combine Hunt’s 32 kernel sentences. This method has been found to be both
reliable and practical (13). The student could be advantageously retested
after a practice period; thus, the student, in a writing activity, could see a
graphic representation of progress.
The sentence-combining material
could be easily individualized (with
audio or video tapes and booklets) to serve as an initial writing experience for
students awaiting entry to occupational training programs. The limited
enrollment at many adult institutions like the Alberta Vocational Centre requires some students to wait for a relatively long period of time (up to eight
months) before an opening is available. Often basic skill improvement is offered by the institution where prospective students are provided with independent programs, and instructors are available for consultation and direction.
Futhermore, learning assistance support systems are becoming more com-
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119
in adult upgrading centres and community colleges where students work
skill improvement programs during free time. Some students entering
these institutions are registered directly in grade eleven or twelve courses;
thus, they often have not received formal instruction in basic writing skills.
For such adult students, the sentence-combining curriculum seems especially
appropriate for building writing competence.
mon
on
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