An Analysis of Sentence Structures Used in English Paragraphs Written by Thai Primary School Students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/jlapsu.2024.11Keywords:
Sentence Structure, English Paragraph Writing, Primary School Students, EFL Learners’ CorpusAbstract
The purposes of this study were to examine sentence structures used in English paragraphs written by Grade 6 students and to compare the sentence structures used by the students with different English proficiency levels. The present study employed a quantitative study approach. The participants were 203 Grade 6 students at a primary school in northeast Thailand. Each was asked to take a proficiency test and write a descriptive paragraph. The frequency, mean, and S.D. were calculated to analyze the sentence structures used in paragraphs written by the students. The chi-square test was also used to compare the differences between the sentence structure occurrences of three groups of students with different proficiency scores. The results showed that the participants most frequently used coordinate main clauses. Moreover, no quotation was found in the paragraph written by the participants. Considering the production unit's length, the clauses’ mean length was 6.8. The mean length of sentence and T-unit were 16.24 and 11.15, respectively. The chi-square test revealed that the difference between these three proficiency levels and the performance in employing sentence structures of Grade 6 students is significant at the 0.05 level in terms of using correlative clauses, relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and mean length of clauses. The results proved that different proficiency levels affected the sentence structures employed in paragraph writing. This study can be helpful in EFL writing instruction and English writing teaching material development.
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