STUDENTS’ SENTENCE COMPLEXITY IN ENGLISH WRITING IN THE CONTEXT OF CLIL BILINGUAL PRIMARY EDUCATION

Alfia Sari

Abstract


This study explored the students’ sentence complexity in English writing by analyzing their skills in producing complex sentences. The context of this study was a CLIL bilingual primary education where the students acquire the language through some subjects such as Science and Math. The data were collected from the writings from fifty primary six students on the topic of a personal diary. The documents were analyzed to determine the number of sentences, the number of complex sentences, and the percentage of complex sentences relative to other sentence types. Using Pearson product-moment correlation, the relationship between the number of sentences and the number of complex sentences was analyzed. The result revealed that twenty out of fifty students had a higher proportion of complex sentences and only one student did not produce complex sentences. It concluded that the CLIL approach had been successfully given input and exposure to Indonesian bilingual primary education students as the students’ sentence complexity was high.  In addition, there was a substantial relationship between the number of sentences produced by students and the number of complex sentences. It demonstrated that if the number of sentences written by students was high, thereby was the number of complex sentences they produced. This result can be a consideration for teachers to use the CLIL approach in promoting English to primary students.

Keywords: CLIL, primary education, second language acquisition, sentence complexity


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