A Pedagogical Assessment of Syntactic Unit Instruction in Secondary Schools

Abstract

While syntactically complex structures are important for reading comprehension, academic writing quality, and oral discourse coherence, research on form-focused instruction (FFI) for such structures has mainly taken place in Anglophone and Western European settings, and the implementation of FFI in post-Soviet education systems has not been the subject of empirical studies. While Grade 8 of the national curriculum of Azerbaijan explicitly focuses on compound-complex sentences, participial constructions, and embedded clauses, no peer-reviewed study has examined evidence from current classroom practice in relation to FFI principles in Grade 8 or the barriers that impede it. A mixed-methods convergent parallel design was adopted in this study, which included 230 Grade 8 students and 20 teachers of the Azerbaijani language in ten secondary schools in urban and rural areas. The study comprised a written competency test, structured classroom observation, and semi-structured teacher interviews, which were analyzed using t-tests, ANOVA, Pearson correlation, multiple regression, and thematic analysis. The highest score was obtained for marking clause boundaries, and the lowest score was obtained for marking subject/predicate agreement. Urban students had higher scores in all dimensions and significantly higher scores for marking clause boundaries and overall competence than rural students and at the school level. The certified teachers exhibited significantly more FFI-aligned practice than the uncertified teachers, and there was a negative correlation between the degree of grammar-translation instruction and the competence level, while there was no significant correlation between instructional time allocation and the competence level. The results show that teacher certification and reliance on grammar-translation, and not lesson duration, are the best predictors of syntactic competence, suggesting that teacher certification and alignment of curriculum materials with the curriculum are priorities for reform in similar post-Soviet contexts.