Effects of Sentence-Combining Instruction for Spanish-Speaking Language-Minority Students

Research indicates that sentence-combining instruction is effective for improving writing outcomes; however, no studies to date have examined the effects of sentence-combining instruction on the writing skills of Spanish-speaking language-minority (LM) students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicit sentence-combining instruction that focused on correct adjective use when used with Spanish-speaking LM students with poor sentence construction skills. Across two studies, seven Spanish-speaking LM children in third to fifth grade participated in sentence-combining interventions designed to teach adjective placement. Results indicated that there was a functional relation between the introduction of sentence-combining instruction and student performance on sentence-writing probes. In addition, the intervention led to an improvement in number of correct writing sequences on the sentence-writing probe.