From drill to practice? A question of generalization

The current study examined the relationship between hearing-impaired students' (N = 20) ability to write syntactically correct sentences (Noun + Verb + Where and Noun + Verb + Noun) in two formats, one structured and one unstructured. Two sentence-generating tasks were administered as operational measures of the structured format. A story-writing task was administered as an operational measure of the second format. A comparison of student performance across the two formats indicated that students generated more syntactically correct sentences in the structured than the unstructured format. There were very low correlations between the performance on the two formats. The widespread use of structural teaching activities which utilize metalinguistic sentence patterns are discussed. Implications of these findings are discussed in relationship to this widespread practice.