Improving Freshmen Students’ Sentence Accuracy Through Sentence Combining Drills: a Case Study in Bina Nusantara University

Abstract

Expressing ideas using accurate sentences is commonly a problematic case for freshmen students due to lack of sentence structure knowledge and inadequate drillings in classroom. It happens because a lot of freshmen students still produce meaningless and unclear sentences in writings. This phenomenon applies to freshmen students of Bina Nusantara University (BINUS), who took English subject in the first semester. Thus, this study attempts to investigate whether Sentence Combining Drills can improve sentence accuracy of BINUS freshmen students who took English Access. For data collection, the study gathered the data from forty eight freshmen students who share similarity in upper-intermediate level of English. The research method will scrutinize the results from the students’ scores and students’ opinions about positive improvements as written in the questionnaires. The study used descriptive qualitative analysis to discuss the findings. The findings of the research proved that practicing sentence combining exercises can boost the scores of sentence constructions and improves the quality of students’ writing. At the same time, the results of the study are valuable for enriching approaches of teaching academic writing in EFL contexts.