Sentence Composition Instruction With Language Supports for a Fifth Grader With a Learning Disability: A Pilot Study

Area of Science:

• Special Education
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Traditional writing interventions for elementary students with learning disabilities focus on paragraph-level strategies.
• Students struggling with sentence composition require explicit instruction and may benefit from language and self-regulation support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of a sentence writing intervention on the writing abilities of a fifth-grade student with a learning disability.

Main Methods:

• An exploratory AB single-case design was employed.
• The intervention involved 10 daily lessons focused on constructing complete sentences with adjectives, incorporating planning steps, a self-checklist, and word banks.

Main Results:

• The sentence writing intervention demonstrated a large positive effect on the participant's use of sentence elements (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
• Significant improvements were observed in sentence length (total correct word sequences), accuracy (incorrect word sequences), and complexity (correct word sequences per sentence).

Conclusions:

• Explicit sentence construction instruction can enhance sentence length, accuracy, and complexity for students with learning disabilities.
• The integration of language and self-regulation supports improved the consistency of the student's written output.