An Experimental Research Of Applying Sentence Combining To Foster The Writing Competence Of High School Students

As is clearly pointed out in the teaching program for the Middle School English, to foster the learners' writing ability is one of the goals of English teaching.The Current English Curriculum Criterion for the middle school English teaching includes the requirements for writing as one of the objectives of the language competence students must abtain. Moreover, the score for writing in the College Entrance Exam is much higher than before in proportion.To a certain extent, the results in the College Entrance Exam can reflect the English competence of high school students. Assessing this fact, we have found that the students' abilities of reading and listening have made great progress while the writing ability has not been quite obviously improved and some of the students' writing score even has failed to reach the lowest standard set by the education authorities.So why has the students' writing ability not been improved a lot? To me, the answer to the question is that the students are unable to be free from the influence of Chinese syntax, and thus they can not produce correct and effective sentences. Besides, it also has a lot to do with the students' skillful manipulation of the English sentence structures.In 1965 Kellogg W. Hunt developed the minimal terminable unit, which threw a great deal of light on the measurement of syntactic maturity. In 1970s, Thomas C. Cooper did an experiment of sentence combining in teaching writing. After nine weeks' training, he found that the writing ability of the students given sentence-combining practice was stylistically stronger than that of students in the control group. In the middle of 1980s, the American scholar Hillocks analyzed the data of 68 reports about teaching of writing and found that sentence combining was one of the most helpful methods of improving the student' writing ability.Inspired by the study carried out by Thomas C. Cooper and Hillocks, I myself decided to do the same thing and have also found that sentence combining is a most helpful method. My six months' experiment proves that sentence combining is an effective way to improve the students' ability in terms of their sentence average length by means of the sentence minimal terminable unit. In view of its merit, this teaching method is of good help in practice to improving the high school students' ability of English writing.