The Effect of Sentence Manipulation on Subsequent Measures of Reading and Listening Comprehension

Abstract

WRITERS IN LANGUAGE development have identified the importance of grammatical (sentence structure) knowledge to the following areas of language processing: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It has been suggested that instruction in one of these four areas aimed at increasing grammatical knowledge should produce gains in other areas. Results in the research literature have shown significant gains in syntactic fluency on the part of subjects who received a synthetic method of grammatical instruction, such as sentence-combining, over analytic approaches, such as formal grammar instruction. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of a synthetic approach in teaching writing to analytic approaches on growth in listening and reading. One hundred twenty-four grade four students were instructed in one of three methods: sentence-combining (synthetic), sentence-reduction (analytic), or element identification (analytic). One of two instructors taught each of the treatment conditions. Subjects were blocked according to reading ability as determined by a pretest measure. Measures included two measures of reading growth, one measure of listening growth, and assessments of writing growth. Analyses of covariance and subsequent post hoc analyses on the data indicated a significant difference of the sentence-combining group over the textbook group on all measures except the standardized test of reading comprehension. Subjects in the sentence-reduction group performed significantly better than the textbook group on only the cloze test of reading comprehension. Conclusions and implications are drawn from the analyses of the data and discussed.