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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

8-2019

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

English: Teaching English as a Second Language: M.A.

Department

English

College

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

John Madden

Second Advisor

Choonkyong Kim

Third Advisor

Sharon Cogdill

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

ESL, coordinating conjunctions, graphic organizers

Abstract

Abstract

This study examined whether participants enrolled in a university-based intensive English program in the upper Midwest would better comprehend English sentences containing coordinating conjunctions after rearranging them into fill-in graphic organizers with the assistance of an instruction manual. Participants in the control group were provided with the same sentences but not the fill-in graphic organizers. This study also investigated the experimental and control groups’ attitudes toward the comprehension questions and the experimental group’s perceptions of the usefulness of fill-in graphic organizers and an instruction manual for understanding questions. The results indicated that, even though the experimental group perceived the comprehension questions to be slightly easier than the control group, the fill-in graphic organizers were less effective than sentences alone for correctly answering comprehension questions. Overall, the experimental group considered the fill-in graphic organizers to be somewhat helpful for comprehending questions and perceived the instruction manual as somewhat helpful for rearranging sentences into graphic displays.

Comments/Acknowledgements

Thank you to my husband and daughters for their patience, encouragement, and prayers.

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