The effect of context-based writing activities on the syntactic density in middle school students' written expression

This study examines the extent to which contextual writing activities affect the syntactic density of sentence structures in middle school students' written expressions. The research was conducted within a quasi-experimental design based on a quantitative method, using a pretest-posttest pattern with experimental and control groups. In the pretest phase, students were asked to choose one of the following tasks: "rewriting a narrative text" or "writing a story based on a proverb," and they were instructed to produce a narrative text accordingly. The texts obtained from the students were analyzed using the "Computer-Based Syntactic Density Evaluation Form." During the 8-week implementation period, contextual writing activities were applied to the experimental group, while the Ministry of National Education curriculum was followed in the control group. After the eight-week process, in the posttest phase, students in both the experimental and control groups were asked to select one of the following options and write a text: "an opinion column about global warming and proposed solutions" or "an email addressed to the relevant authorities regarding solutions to the issue of stray animals and stray dogs." The texts obtained were evaluated using the "Computer-Based Syntactic Density Evaluation Form," just as in the pretest. The data obtained from the research were analyzed using the SPSS.27 software package. First, the normal distribution of the total scores obtained from the pretest and posttest, as well as the scores related to the eight dimensions in the form, was examined. Before conducting analyses related to the research hypotheses, the fulfillment of the normality assumption for each dimension in the experimental and control groups was checked. When analyzing the hypotheses, parametric tests were used for variables that met the normality assumption and non-parametric tests were used for those that did not. When the experimental and control groups were compared on a dimensional basis, no significant differences were found between the groups in "the number of paragraphs used in the text, the average number of sentences per paragraph, the average number of words per sentence, the average number of syllables per word, and the average number of letters per word." According to the results, a moderate increase in the number of sentences in the texts written by the experimental group was observed in favor of this group. Additionally, significant differences in favor of the experimental group were recorded in terms of total word count and lexical diversity. In the comparisons between the pretest and posttest within the experimental group, it was determined that the average number of syllables and letters per word in the texts increased significantly in the posttest results. The findings of this quasi-experimental study reveal that contextual writing activities significantly increased the number of syllables and letters in the words used by students in the experimental group. No significant change was observed between the pretest and posttest in the experimental group in terms of paragraph count, sentence count, and lexical variety. However, it was found that this group outperformed the control group in the number of sentences, total word count, and use of different words. The results for the control group indicate that traditional writing instruction has a moderate effect on written productivity (word count and lexical diversity), but does not lead to significant improvement in qualitative criteria such as text organization and sentence-paragraph structure. Overall, considering the findings of this research, it can be recommended that writing activities be carried out with a contextual focus.