Purposeful direct instruction of sentence combining, particularly in classrooms populated by English Language Learners and struggling writers, is making a comeback! The effect of using this aspect of language arts methodology can have far-reaching and beneficial implications. Even more exciting is the fact that many English/language arts teachers are once more giving careful consideration to revamping their lesson plans, strategies, and materials to integrate sentence combining, along with several other effective strategies in powerful ways that result in an increase in students learning and their overall academic success. Part of this instructional overhaulis fueled partly by the increasing demands in the assessment arena, but more importantly, educators across the country and school systems around the world have been paying more attention to the growing body of evidence regarding the importance of students mastery of sentence construction as part of their journey toward strengthening literacy skills and becoming more effective writers.

According to Saddler and Graham in their study reported in Journal of Educational Psychology (2005), writing ability also has an impact on the improvement of pupil achievement across the whole curriculum. Yet, they say, writing has been neglected in the current US educational reform agenda No Child Left Behind, 2001 (NCLB) which focuses on improving children reading and mathematics. They found that sentence combining led to greater improvements in sentence construction than teaching based on [traditional] grammar approaches.

In the Executive Summary of their report (entitled Writing Next) to the Carnegie Foundation of New York, authors Graham and Perin describe the state of writing proficiency in U.S. schools, and they offer the following comments:

Writing well is not just an option for young people—it is a necessity. Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for participation in civic life and in the global economy. Yet every year in the United States large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required by colleges or employers. In addition, every school day 7,000 young people drop out of high school (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006), many of them because they lack the basic literacy skills to meet the growing demands of the high school curriculum (Kamil, 2003; Snow & Biancarosa, 2003). Because the definition of literacy includes both reading and writing skills, poor writing proficiency should be recognized as an intrinsic part of this national literacy crisis.
Graham and Perin summarize findings rendered through the use of a meta-analysis of instructional practices on student writing quality (2007). The report presents the recommendation of Eleven Elements of Effective Adolescent Writing Instructionthat have shown moderate to high efficacy. Although the authors note that these elements do not constitute a full writing curriculum, it is clear that they strongly promote the idea that teachers should be combining these practices in flexible ways to strengthen their students literacy development.

English Language Learners (ELLs) come to our classrooms at various levels of literacy in their home languages as well as a wide range of formal schooling backgrounds. At the secondary level, ELL students are required to demonstrate writing proficiency, especially on state-mandated tests, not just in their content area classes. Many of these required assessments usually consist of a demand writing portion. Florida Report on the 2007 FCAT Writing+ Assessment states that:

Students are expected to produce a focused, organized, well-supported draft in response to an assigned topic within a 45-minute time period. According to the FCAT Writing+ scoring rubric, the student should be engaged with the writing, and the response should reflect the student insight into the writing situation and demonstrate a mature command of language.

The essay component is only one half of the test. Assessments such as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT Writes +) also requires a second component:

The multiple-choice portion of FCAT Writing+ measures the Sunshine State Standards benchmarks that address prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. The multiple-choice portion of FCAT Writing+ measures the Sunshine State Standards benchmarks that address prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. These questions assess the elements of the writing process. To be successful, students must answer questions related to focus, organization, support, and conventions. Multiple-choice questions measuring conventions have three answer choices; items measuring focus, organization, and support have four answer choices. The multiple-choice section of the test includes writing plans that measure student knowledge of focus and organization in prewriting; writing samples that simulate student-generated draft writing and measure student knowledge of focus, organization, and support; cloze selections containing numbered blanks that measure student knowledge of spelling and usage conventions; and stand-alone structures that provide a succinct context for measuring student knowledge of the conventions of spelling, usage, capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure.
The Florida Department of Education recommendation for teachers is to engage students in a recursive writing process that includes planning, writing, revising, editing, and publishing.  Ssentence combining is one effective practice that, at least in part, addresses the criteria that reflect the overall goals of a sound writing curriculum in schools.

In its Teaching Guidelines, the Clark County School District English Language Learner Program proposes several approaches which address the needs of secondary ELL students in their journey toward become more effective writers. Among these approaches is sentence combining, the goal of which is to assist ELL students to develop fluency and flexibility in writing English sentences, as well as a context for grammatical concepts. (The section of Clark County School District Teaching Guidelines for its writing curriculum appears in the appendix of this book.)

The Alliance for Excellent Education offers realistic and feasible solutions that include nine instructional practices that are potentially effective for developing literacy in adolescent ELLs. One of these is the integration of all four language skills into instruction from the start. To help improve ELL literacy instruction, policy makers are strongly encouraged to promote proven and promising practices such as teaching the components and processes of reading and writing. It is important to note that researchers have found that adolescent ELL literacy is enhanced when teens are taught using a process-based approach (Garcia & Godina, 2004; Valdés, 1999; Villasenor, 2003). Using these processes, learners can examine a text, make conclusions about it, articulate and incorporate those conclusions, and then evaluate the effectiveness of the incorporation. The process creates awareness about the functions of language, and the reflection inherent in the process helps students practice the kinds of highly abstract thinking that is essential to succeeding in high school and beyond into college or the world of work.

Since sentence combining is included as one of the most promising interventions that teachers can incorporate in their literacy instructional toolkits, the intent of this project to encourage my colleagues, wherever they may be, to continue their contributions to the body of evidence through action research in their respective classrooms. Keeping in mind that this approach is one of many interventions in a wider curriculum, the goal should always be that sentence combining comprises a process of guided practice toward empowering students, particularly ELL students, in becoming independent writers, readers, and thinkers in academic and real-lifeenvironments.

Sentence combining, then, can be thought of as a viable intervention and as an important part of a continuum, through which we lead and accompany our students from sentence level to paragraph and essay development to more authentic and longer written products, including reports and research papers.

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