A Comparative Study between the Use of Adjectives and Adjective Clauses Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy in Writing Sentence Levels Versus Paragraph Levels

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to examine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ comprehension of adjectives and adjective clauses by writing in different phases. The first phase, students were writing an individual sentence by using adjectives and adjectives clauses. The next phase was creating paragraphs using the same rules that they used previously. The framework of the present research was Bloom’s taxonomy to examine students’ development from the lowest levels of cognition into the highest levels of the hierarchy. The design of this study was descriptive qualitative research focusing on 20 students’ writing who used the target grammatical structures. To analyze the collected data, the author used themes to divide the data based on a sentence level and a paragraph level. The results of the research revealed EFL students’ success in applying the target grammatical rules at the lowest cognitive levels by composing an individual sentence. However, the findings showed that only six students out of 20 were able to reach the highest levels of cognitive to create paragraphs using adjective clauses; whereas, the rest of the students failed to create paragraphs using adjective clauses. However, all students successfully composed simple and accurate individual sentences using both one adjective and the other for using adjective clauses, which is considered the lowest levels of the hierarchy.