The Effect of Sentence Combining Instruction with Second- to Fourth-Grade Children: a Replication Study in Turkey

Translating ideas into acceptable sentence is an essential writing production process. Limited sentence construction skills can hinder young writers from expressing ideas as intended or creating sentences that are comprehensible to their audiences. This may also limit other writing production processes, as young writers must devote considerable attention to this skill until it becomes more facile. This investigation replicated an earlier sentence combining study conducted in the USA by Saddler and Graham (Journal of Educational Psychology, 97:43–54, 2005). In the current study, 88 Grade 2 to 4 Turkish students who received sentence combining instruction that included peer-assisted learning were compared to 83 students in the same grades and school who continued to receive their regular classroom writing instruction. Students receiving sentence combining instruction had statistically higher scores on measures of sentence fluency, writing quality, and length of essays than students in the business-as-usual comparison. The study provided evidence that the peer-assisted learning model of sentence combining instruction tested here and in Saddler and Graham (Journal of Educational Psychology, 97:43–54, 2005) was effective. These findings also provided support for the importance of sentence construction skills, as teaching such skills resulted in more general improvements in writing, including an improvement of overall quality of text. Implications for practice, theory, and research are discussed.