Testing and teaching grammatical connectives in a special grade six class

Anderson, Stephen William (1979) Testing and teaching grammatical connectives in a special grade six class. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The main purpose of the internship was to test students in a special grade six class for their understanding of connectives in print and to teach those students who indicated a need on the basis of test scores, how connectives signify certain mental operations essential to the act of comprehension. -- All of the students in the class were given a reading connectives test adapted from Watts (1944). Understanding of fourteen connectives was tested by having the students complete sentence fragments ending in a connective. Students had to choose the one logical and grammatical completion from the four presented. Those students who failed to score at least three out of four correct in a particular connective received instruction in that connective. -- Each of the instructional periods was thirty minutes in length and emphasized how connectives signify relationships of a specific kind. The instructional period was followed up the next day with a thirty-minute period of reinforcement that called upon the students to practice the relationship signified by the connective. This practice involved the skills of listening, writing, speaking, and reading. -- The outcome of the internship suggested that comprehension of connectives in print depends upon more than knowing the mental operation signified by the connective. One of the more notable factors seemed to be an understanding of the syntactic and semantic nature of the clauses joined by the connective.

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