Sentence Writing Instruction for Young Struggling Writers: A Single-Case Study

Sentence writing is a critical early writing skill but intervention research in this area has typically lagged behind other aspects of writing, particularly for students with or at-risk for writing difficulties. This multiple baseline across participants single-case study evaluated the effect of a sentence writing intervention on the writing of early elementary grade struggling writers. The three second-grade participants received daily lessons on how to identify parts of a complete sentence (who/what, action, capital letter, punctuation) and use them in their own writing. Results indicated a functional relationship between the intervention and sentence writing for two out of three participants with a large to very large effect on participants’ ability to identify and use sentence parts in writing as well as a moderate to large effect on participants’ correct and incorrect word sequences in their writing. Implications for research and practice are discussed.