I love sentence combining and think it has been woefully neglected in our classrooms. Here's some proof: See the Journal of Educational Psychology, 2005, Vol 97, pp 43-54. Title: The effects of peer-assisted sentence-combining instruction on the writing performance of more and less skilled young writers. Authors: Bruce Saddler and Steve Graham >From the abstract 'The authors examined whether instruction designed to >improve sentence-construction skills was beneficial for more and less skilled >4th-grade writers. In comparison with peers receiving grammar instruction, >students in the exp treatment became more adept at combining simpler sentences >into more complex sentences. For the exp students, the sentence combining >skills produced improved story writing as well as the use of these skills when >revising." Timothy Rasinski 404 White Hall Kent State University Kent, OH 44242 330-672-0649 Cell -- 330-962-6251 FAX 330-672-2025 [EMAIL PROTECTED] informational website: www.timrasinski.com professional development DVD: http://www.roadtocomprehension.com/ <https://exchange.kent.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.roadtocomprehension.com/>
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of thomas Sent: Thu 7/5/2007 8:43 AM To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] Sentence Combining On 7/4/07 10:15 PM, "kimberlee hannan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > She said it was mainly a revision strategy, but I can see it being used for > a whole lot more than that. > > She took a long drawn paragraph from Across Five Aprils. She broke it down > into its smallest pieces. We combined it together and discussed the vision > we were getting as we dealt with each part. Finally we read the actual > paragraph. Not only was our sentence very close to the actual author's, the > paragraph made complete sense. She said if we did that with shared novels > before we got to the complicated ones, they made much more sense to the kids > and they are familiar. > > I thought there would be books about this strategy. I moved since the CATE > conference and the paperwork is in a box somewhere on the back patio. > Hopefully, I will find it before may daughters inherit it. > Kim > There is actually research that shows sentence combining does have an impact on writing - not huge - but an impact nevertheless. I did just what your prof did with my 5/6 graders. We would do usually one paragraph (or several long sentences) from a novel we were reading. I would look for interesting sentence structure possibilities. It was a great way to discuss not just simple grammar issues and choices and punctuation involved in putting sentences together in particular ways, but also the author's style. I also did one other paragraph (or several sentences) - also interesting ones - where my students created their own sentences using the skeleton grammatical structures of the given sentences. My students loved this activity, maybe even more than the sentence combining. I long long ago read a piece of research by James Christie which showed that being able to put together (compose) particular sentence structures had an impact then on being able to read them. His examples tended to be more like the "imitation" I just described than the sentence combining but I think it would work the same way. Primary teachers have long been doing this with variations on texts. "If I were in charge of the world, ......" and kids write their own variations. And we've been talking about that with music/songs! They also loved then running into these spots in the story. I think both had an impact on their comprehension (a really close reading obviously) and their writing. I saw a particularly big impact on their writing. They no longer settled for simple or compound sentences or even for adjective or adverb clauses. Rather they tended to use more sophistical structures like nominative absolutes, appoisitives, and so on - that kind of piling on of details in sentences through phrases that is so much more characteristic of sophisticated writing. I definitely didn't over do it. Most work on writing came through writing workshop and most reading through reading - reading workshop in all its glory! Sally _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
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