| Summary: | 碩士 === 南台科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 100 === The purposes of this study were to explore: (a) the English major students’ recognition of the eight kinds of sentence structures; (b) sentence patterns in the English major students’ English writing assignment; (c) the command of English sentence structures of good writers and poor writers; (d) the participants’ English language proficiency; (e) the participants’ English learning experiences.
The participants of this study consisted of 20 students from level A English writing class and 17 students from level F English writing class. Based on an English writing common exam held by Applied English Department of the participants’ college, level A participants were classified as good writers, while level F participants were classified as poor writers. The instruments used in this study included questionnaire, English sentence structures test, and the participants’ three English writing assignments. The questionnaire consisted of students’ background information, English language certification, and English learning experiences. Moreover, the English sentence structures test consisted of 24 questions based on eight kinds of sentence structures- coordinate clauses, subordinate clauses, appositives, noun substitutes, participial phrases, relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and adverbial conjunctions. The data of research question 1, 2, 4 and 5 of this study were analyzed quantitatively by descriptive statistics in the SPSS program; the data of research question 3 were analyzed qualitatively based on the participants’ production of sentence patterns in their writing assignments.
The major findings were given below:
1.Level A participants could recognize more types of sentence patterns than level F participants did.
2.Level A participants could employ more kinds of sentence patterns in their writing assignments than level F participants did.
3.Level A participants tended to use the different kinds of sentence patterns to combine their sentences and produce the long sentences to develop their ideas and establish relationships among them. By contrast, level F students applied much less types of sentence structures to combine their sentences, and they did not often construct relationships among their sentences.
4.Level A participants had slightly higher level of English proficiency than level F participants, and therefore it did not clearly identify whether their L2 proficiency made much difference in their recognition and production of sentence patterns.
5.The data of the questionnaire reported positive connections between the participants’ English learning experiences and their recognition of sentence patterns, and between their English learning experiences and their production of sentence patterns.
Key words: recognition of English sentence structures, sentence writing performance, syntactic complexity
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