Effects of sentence-combining instruction for spanish-speaking language-minority students: Evidence from two single-case experiments

Research indicates that sentence-combining instruction is effective for improving writing outcomes; however, no studies to date have examined the effects of sentencecombining instruction on the writing skills of Spanishspeaking language-minority (LM) students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicit sentence-combining instruction that focused on correct adjective use when used with Spanish-speaking LMstudentswith poor sentence construction skills.Across two studies, seven Spanish-speaking LM children in third to fifth grade participated in sentence-combining interventions designed to teach adjective placement. Results indicated that there was a functional relation between the introduction of sentence-combining instruction and student performance on sentence-writing probes. In addition, the intervention led to an improvement in number of correct writing sequences on the sentence-writing probe.