Enhancing ESL Writing using Sentence Variety Checklist

Liza Abdullah,Rosnani Kassim,Noor Amili Abdul Ghani ,Hazlinah Ab Rahman ,Ainul Azmin Zamin

doi:10.6007/ijarbss/v9-i13/6245

Abstract

One of the students’ problems in writing is lack of variety in sentence structure. Students seem to learn one basic pattern of subject, verb, and object and stick to it. They may also lack knowledge and practice of the different structures, and connecting words, necessary to create sentence variety. Although this is a fundamental problem in student writing, little emphasis has been put on it in the ESL Writing class because oftentimes teachers and students think that as long as there are no grammatical errors in writing, it is “okay.” Therefore, even if students do show some improvement, most of them have not really achieved more desired marks in their writing assessments. Hence, this classroom research intended to examine the respondents’ writing performance before and after using a sentence variety checklist adapted from Langan (1993) and to analyze respondents’ perceptions towards using the sentence variety checklist in their writing. A total of 20 university students in an intensive English language program participated in the study. Data for the study were collected based on students’ essays and responses from a 20-item survey questionnaire. The results revealed slight increase in students’ writing performance in generating complex as compared to simple and compound sentences. In addition, most students found the checklist made writing more interesting and urged them to become more aware of what they were writing. In conclusion, the usage of sentence variety checklist can be one of the tools for ESL students to ‘add more colors’ into their writing. Keywords: ESL writing, sentence variety checklist, sentence structures, sentence combining

Highlights

Saddler (2007) stated that in the U.S, writing is increasingly being evaluated by state and national tests as well as by the college entrance examinations administered by the College Board, and the scores reveal deficits at all grade levels
Even though it is considered as the basic elements of written language, constructing good and varied sentences has not been given enough attention in most classrooms which leads to limited research carried out to examine the possible effect of sentence variety on ESL writing performance
There was a statistically significant increase in the students’ writing performance from the first writing (M=3.9, SD=.79) to the second writing (M=4.45, SD=.89), t(19)= -4.819, with p.00005.These results suggest that the checklist does have an effect on students’ writing performance

Summary

Introduction

Saddler (2007) stated that in the U.S, writing is increasingly being evaluated by state and national tests as well as by the college entrance examinations administered by the College Board, and the scores reveal deficits at all grade levels. Lack of sentence variety is certainly not the only problem faced by ESL students, but to add to this predicament, they lack native speakers’ intuition about what sounds right, and they may just be unaware of the monotonous nature of their writing Despite knowing that this is a fundamental problem in their writing, students seem to be reluctant to learn more about it. Numerous researches have been conducted related to this study, most of them are on sentence combining that is the basis of sentence variety Even though it is considered as the basic elements of written language, constructing good and varied sentences has not been given enough attention in most classrooms which leads to limited research carried out to examine the possible effect of sentence variety on ESL writing performance. This study seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) Is there any difference in students’ writing performance before and after using the sentence variety checklist? 2) What are students’ perceptions towards the use of sentence variety checklist in writing?

Methods

Results

Conclusion