Sentence Combining: An Effective Way To Improve The High School Students' Ability Of English Writing

Teaching writing is a highly complex task. The ability to write effectively cannot be built within a short period of time. It can only be achieved by practicing step by step from sentence to passage and then to section and chapter. Last year, applying the concept of T-unit proposed by Kellogg W. Hunt, I tested the students' writing ability and found that they were poor in writing, especially in sentence writing. How can I manage to improve the high school students' ability of writing? I got an idea from the investigations made by Thomas C. Cooper and Hillocks that sentence combining was a most helpful way. After nine months' of practicing, sentence combining was proved to be an effective way to improve high school students' ability of English writing.This thesis consists of six chapters .In Chapter I, the Introduction, I talk of the importance of English Writing, give a survey of the writing ability of high school students and college-level students, and briefly introduce the investigations in teaching of writing made by Kellogg W. Hunt, Thomas C. Cooper and Hillocks. ' Chapter II gives a brief survey of English writing ability of high school and college students. The concept of T-unit ("the minimal terminable unit") is first introduced and then applied to test the students' writing ability. From the analyses of the test results and the rate of score for writing in CET-4 and G-Exam and the sentences quoted from them, we find that not only high school students but also college-level students are poor in writing, especially in sentence writing.In Chapter HI, I discuss both the characteristics of the writing task and its evaluation principles in College Entrance Exam and the requirements and aims of writing described in The English Curriculum Criterion. It canbe seen that only those students who can write better sentences can achieve higher grade in the College Entrance Exam. Some examples of sentences made by Chinese students in their writings listed here show that many students cannot free themselves from the influence of Chinese sentence patterns. In another word, students' success in writing depends to a certain extent on how well they have mastered the skills of writing good sentences. It is thus concluded that "According to the law of language learning, writing should be practiced step by step from words to sentences and then to sections and chapters" and that emphasis should be laid on sentence skills in teaching writing in high schools.In Chapter IV, four sentence patterns of English and some other patterns that add variety to writing are first introduced and then three major contrasts between English and Chinese sentence structures are introduced with examples. The purpose of this chapter is to show how to help the students to achieve more mature English sentence structure and to avoid writing "Chinglish" sentences.On the basis of a discussion of the theoretical basis of approaching Chinese students' English writing difficulty through sentence-combining exercises, Chapter V, introduces the investigations made by Thomas C. Cooper and Hillocks and a suggested treatment with three types of sentence-combining exercises, which include problem-solving exercises , paragraph exercises and composition exercises. The treatment is an effective way to help students lengthen T-unit length and can benefit them on the improvement of syntactic maturity.In Chapter VI, I introduce the experiment done in sentence combining. The experiment result shows that students with immature syntactic ability may benefit a lot from sentence-combining exercises. In other words, sentence combining proves to be an effective way to improve the high school students' ability of English writing.