Portfolio
Sentence Combining: A Strategy for Improving
Reading, Writing, and Listening Skills
Several years ago, I was a graduate student at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. Entering graduate school was a scary proposition, but doing so as a full-time teacher, a minister’s wife, and a minority student in a historically black university had me shaking in my boots. Then, I met Dr. Anna J. Cistrunk and learned the true meaning of fear.
Dr. Cistrunk was the acting chair of the English department. As veteran teacher, she did not tolerate fools and ran a tightly disciplined classroom. When I learned that I would be taking advanced grammar with this formidable woman, I wanted to flee in terror. Instead, I went to the state depository of textbooks and bought three middle school grammar texts that had extensive lessons on sentence diagramming.
My father was in the Air Force, so we moved around quite a bit. In fact, I attended 13 different schools during my youth. This meant there were holes in my education, and somehow I always seemed to miss the classes on diagramming. Advanced grammar with Dr. Cistrunk was going to tax me. Solution? Study like mad!
Dr. Cistrunk’s course, officially titled “Modern Trends in Grammar,” was based on Frank O’Hare’s 1968 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) monograph Sentence Combining. O’Hare’s study had been conducted at Florida State University’s junior high school, with Dr. Cistrunk serving as one of the eight student assistants assigned to the project. What she saw profoundly affected her, and 20 years later, she was still using his methodology.
So, what is this strategy?
Sentence combining is a nontraditional method of teaching grammar that has been shown to improve sentence maturity, as well as listening skills and reading comprehension. Its effect on writing has been demonstrated in study after study, as shown below:
O’Hare, 1973: Seventh graders wrote as well as graduating seniors.
Straw, 1982: “Sentence combining instruction has been shown to affect significant gains in syntactic control and fluency in writing in a variety of areas with different ethnic groups, ability groups, elementary students, secondary students, and college/university students” (342-3)
While teaching the lowest quartile seventh grade remedial reading students in 1990, I employed sentence patterns with sentence combining exercises as one of my strategies. I hypothesized that better writers would become better readers and embarked upon nontraditional grammar instruction with my students. The results were impressive: 13 of 14 students who were at least two grade equivalencies low in their reading improved at least two grade levels in reading over the course of one school year. One of these students improved five (yes, five!) grade equivalencies during that time. (Pre-instruction and post-instruction reading levels were determined by using the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test.) With this course of instruction, I had accidentally affirmed a large body of research that demonstrate that the teaching of sentence combining skills improves not only syntactic maturity in writing but also improves students’ reading comprehension. Below are several of these studies.
· Straw, 1982: “Sentence-combining instruction affected growth on a standardized test of listening comprehension, a cloze measure of reading comprehension, and measures of syntactic fluency in writing more positively than the textbook identification approach” (348).
· Steadman, 1971: “ . . . found that Black fourth graders posted greater gains in both sentence maturity and reading comprehension after sentence-combining exercises” (as cited in Evans).
· Fisher, 1973: “. . . also noted that significant gains were registered among fifth-, seventh-and ninth-grade students using Hunt’s (1963) measures of syntactic maturity and cloze tests of reading comprehension” (as cited in Evans).
· Evans, 1988: “The implication of these findings is that sentence-combining instruction most influences the reading and writing development of students registering lower scores on tests of such skills” (56).
Does sentence combining work? Oh, yes. And, it is most effective for students with poor reading and writing skills. The studies cited here attest to the effectiveness of this strategy. Finally, my own classroom experience supports these findings. Fifteen minutes of classroom instruction, coupled with fifteen minutes of homework yields tremendous results.
© 2008 by Connie Schenkelberg- If you’d like to reprint this, please contact Connie at cschenkelberg@comcast.net.
