A CORRELATIVE STUDY BETWEEN CREATIVE SENTENCE COMBINING ABILITY AND SYNTACTIC MATURITY IN FREE WRITING IN AN INDONESIAN COLLEGE

Abstract

Syntactic maturity, the ability to generate sentences of greater and preferred complexity, is one of the many elements by which a piece of writing is assessed. It is believed that syntactic maturity grows with ages or grades in the sense that the older a person, or the higher the grade he is in school, the more complex sentences he can produce. Researchers in language teaching, however, have found that syntactic maturity can be accelerated through a language teaching approach which is designated as sentence combining and which has over a long period of time become a common practice in the teaching of English. Studies in sentence combining have been conducted, mostly in the United States, from pre-college to college/ university levels of learning. The results show that it really can hasten the syntactic growth of experimental students. Probably because of this convincing result there are many English course books in the market which make use of sentence combining for enrichment exercises in grammar and writing courses. In the Indonesian context sentence combining is not a new language teaching-learning activity. Such publications are widely in use. Also, the English books designed for use at the high school level obviously provide exercises which make use of this approach. Akaba 17, the colleae which the present researcher serves, is net excepted from this trend. Sentence combining exercises are incorporated in grammar and writing courses which designated as Structure and Composition. However, no research to evaluate the implementation of sentence combining has yet been carried out in the college. Unlike the previous studies, which were all experiment based, the present study is of a non- experiment type. It has been carried out to correlate the students' ability to combine sentences with their syntactic maturity in their free writing. The result of the study shows that they correlate significantly at the level of significance p < .05. In carrying out this study, one of the data collecting instruments, a writing test, and the selection of the subjects were so designed as to make measuring the subjects- syntactic development possible. The subjects were asked to rewrite a choppy, kernel sentences containing essay in a more acceptable way by combining the related ideas in it. The analysis of variance which followed proved that syntactic maturity at Akaba 17 develops significantly from semester 2 to semester 6 but that it tends not to de so from semester 2 to semester 4. When compared with Hunt's normative data on native speakers' syntactic maturity, it was also found that the syntactic maturity of Akaba 17 students is still far behind their native counterparts. Akaba 17 students write essays with a syntactic maturity similar to that found in the eighth and tenth graders. Since the sentence combining ability of Akaba 17 students correlates significantly with their syntactic maturity in writing, it is recommended that this approach to the teaching of writing be maintained and applied intensively to the teaching of composition at Akaba 17 with a view to producing graduates who are capable of writing with syntactic maturity approaching that of their native counterparts.