Identification of sentence types for writing skill in teacher education

Abstract

This research aims to explore the ability of English majors to identify the four basic types of sentences.  English language has four types of sentences, each kind of sentence for different kinds of messages. Sentences are combinations of words that express complete thoughts. Sentences are basic building blocks of writing and communication; therefore, breaking our ideas into sentences is essential for clear communication.  In traditional grammar, the four basic types of sentence structures are the simple sentence, the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the compound-complex sentence, whose identification by the non-native student teachers may be problematic. It’s crucial that English majors recognize word order and sentence types in English to improve their academic writing skills, and hence the identification of four types of sentences by English majors is a must. In this research 35 English majors with low intermediate background were given a pretest of 20 questions in terms of a multiple-choice test to measure their initial success at the beginning.  After 6 hours of intense sentence structure recognition studies, they were given the same pretest, after al elapse of 15 days, as the posttest to determine their final success on the discrimination of simple, compound, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences from each other. After the collection of data from pre-test and post-tests, the data were analyzed by SPSS 21. It was discovered that while pre-test’s was 23%, the mean score of the post-test came up to be 56 %, the percentage of ascent being % 23.