The effect of structured oral sentence frames on receptive and productive vocabulary development

This experimental study compares the effects of vocabulary instruction that includes sentence frames with instruction in which sentence frames are excluded. It also investigates the effects of single/limited-use sentence frames and multi-use frames on receptive and productive vocabulary. Sentence frames are promoted as an instructional practice to help English learners acquire vocabulary. However, there is no research on their effectiveness. This study contributes to filling the gap in research. Forty-two urban middle school long-term English learner students from 4 intact classes participated in this study. Twenty participants learned vocabulary words through explicit instruction and then practiced them using interactive sentence frames in pairs; half of the 10 target words were practiced in single/limited-use sentence frames and half were practiced using multi-use sentence frames. A second group of 22 participants received explicit instruction on the same vocabulary words, but without using sentence frames. Pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests measured receptive and productive vocabulary gains. The treatment group who used sentence frames showed more productive and receptive vocabulary gains than the control group. When comparing more frequent and more limited repetition of sentence frames, results suggest that more repetition of frames does not help students make greater vocabulary gains.