Enhancing students’ ability in sentence structure by using sentence combining: A quasi-experimental research at the eleventh grade vocational high school students of SMKN 6 Bandung in the academic year 2016/2017

Sentences are very basic part of writing. Therefore, mastering the structure of sentence is essential to writing. Limited sentence structure skill will hinder the ability to convert the ideas into a text. It also influences the quality and the clarity of the text. The effective sentence structure is important to enhance the meaning of each sentence. It can be mastered with the effective learning process supported by the appropriate strategy. The use of strategy can helps students to understand and use the variety of sentence structure in their writing. The purposes of this research are to find out; 1) students' ability in sentence structure before implementing Sentence Combining; 2) students' ability in sentence structure after implementing Sentence Combining; 3) the significant improvement of students' ability in sentence structure by using Sentence Combining. The method used in this research was quantitative method with time series experiment (quasi experimental design). The population was 800 students of eleventh grade Vocational High School of SMKN 6 Bandung in Academic Year 2016/2017. One class was taken as sample. The experimental class is XI TGB 1 that consists of 23 students. The instrument used in this research were sentence combining pretest and posttest in form of multiple-choice test and sentence combining exercise and they were process by statistical analysis. It confirms that sentence combining can enhance students' ability in sentence structure. This is supported by the posttest mean in the experimental class (77,56) is greater than the pretest mean (52,04). Then, the result of t-test shows the calculated value of tcount is greater than ttable (7,15> 2.07 = tcount > ttable). Thus, it proves that research hypothesis (Ha) is accepted to mean there is significance improvement of students' ability in sentence structure by using Sentence Combining. The result of N-Gain calculation also shows that value is 0.50 or “average”. It means there is the significant enhancement for about 50%. In conclusion, it is clear that the enhancement of students’ sentence structure after implementing Sentence Combining is more significant than before implementing Sentence Combining. Based on the results in this research, the Sentence Combining can be innovative and appropriate strategy for English sentence structure teaching as part of writing class. The suggestions are that Sentence Combining can be strategy for English teaching such as grammar, punctuation, subject-verb agreement and so forth. It is also can be implement in any writing class. For students, it can be the creative ways to convey their ideas, learn grammar and structures individually in outside classroom as further learning. For the next researchers, it can be the previous study to conduct similar topic quantitatively or qualitatively