Further Effects of Sentence-Combining Practice on Writing Ability

Considerable interest in sentence-combining (SC) exercises has developed following Mellon's (1969) demonstration that practice with such exercises will increase the rate at which students' free writing becomes syntactically more fluent or mature. Mellon's exercises were essentially arhetorical, providing graded experience with a variety of English syntactic patterns without requiring students to provide their own ideas and/or vocabulary. The exercises followed a standard format; each was a set of kernel sentences plus directions for combining the kernels into a single complex statement to be written out by the student. The directions were informed by a basic transformational grammar which students had been taught directly. While Mellon and others (Ney, 1966; Raub, 1966) were introducing the SC procedures, research efforts in child language development were refining syntactic indices that have subsequently been employed as reliable measures of the effect of SC practice. In 1965, Hunt established the T-unit and clause length as sensitive and objective measures describing a normative continuum of children's growth in "syntactic maturity" by grade level. More recently, Hunt (1970) has described more economical procedures for sampling associated with descriptions of syntactic maturity levels. Admittedly, Mellon employed an array of syntactic indices of variable precision and claimed, as his results could not, that SC practice and not the formal instruction in transformational grammar account for the increases in