A COMPARATIVE ANAYSIS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT) AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (ELL) STUDENTS IN THEIR RECOGNITION OF EXTENDED COMPLEX SENTENCES

Complex sentences are formulated by combining an independent or a main clause with a dependent or a subordinate clause. This sentence type can be extended at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the sentence, which makes these sentences even harder to recognize on the part of the learners. For this reason, the present study particularly aims at finding out to what extent first year English Language Education (ELT) students and English Language and Literature (ELL) students, as prospective language professionals, can recognize extended complex sentences among other sentence structures such as simple, compound, and compound-complex sentences. The present paper attempts to reveal if there is any significant difference between first year ELT students and Literature students’ level of recognition after the six-hour remedial teaching. 40-question multiple choice English test was administered to the participants. The alternatives of the test are composed of simple, compound, complex and extended complex sentences and the participants are expected to recognize and mark the extended complex ones among the others. Findings which were analyzed using SPSS 21 reveal that all (100%) ELT students and 93% of the ELL students cannot recognize extended complex sentences before the instruction. However, both groups’ scores increased significantly after the intervention. The current study also indicates that students at the ELT department performed significantly better than the ones at the Literature Department after the six-hour instruction.

Keywords

complex sentences, extended complex sentences,sentence structure, first year students