Pupils’ sentence division : Use of punctuation, connectives and comma splices in textsby grade 3 pupils in Swedish and L2 Swedish

The aim of this study is to analyse how pupils in grade three use punctuation and howthey divide texts into sentences. The material in the study consists of 41 texts by pupils,divided into two types: narrative text and analytical text, written both by pupils withSwedish as their first language and by pupils with Swedish as their second language. Inthe study the pupils’ use of connectives and comma splices has been studied, and therelationship between graphical and syntactical sentences in the texts. The studycompares the results for narrative and analytical texts and the differences between L1and L2 pupils. The study is a follow-up of Per Ledin’s (1998) study of pupils’ use ofpunctuation in the low and intermediate levels of compulsory, and therefore the resultsof this study are compared with those obtained by Ledin. This study shows that in thisrespect L1 and L2 pupils produce texts that do not differ to any great extent. The mostprominent differences between the types of text are that the narrative texts have aclearer flow and a seemingly more logical link between sentences and clauses than theanalytical texts. The results of this study largely agree with Ledin’s results