A Descriptive Analysis of Sentence Construction Across English Exposure Profiles Among Elementary EFL Learners

Abstract

Research on out-of-school English among young learners has concentrated largely on vocabulary and broad proficiency, leaving limited evidence on how reported exposure profiles appear in micro-level sentence production among Indonesian elementary EFL learners. This study describes sentence construction across three reported exposure profiles and identifies recurrent grammatical difficulties. A descriptive qualitative design with frequency tabulation was used with 15 sixth-grade students at SDN 22 Mesuji Timur. Exposure labels were retained from the original classroom tabulation and treated as descriptive profiles because validated cut-off scores could not be reconstructed from the available dataset. Four English sentence-production prompts were coded as complete and accurate, complete with grammatical error, fragment or lexical response, irrelevant or non-target response, or missing. One translation prompt was analyzed separately. Each learner had four production opportunities. The high-profile group had 12 observed responses, while the moderate and limited groups had 11 of 12 and 35 of 36 observed responses because one response was missing in each group. Complete responses accounted for 7/12, 2/11, and 1/35 observed responses, respectively. Recurrent difficulties involved verb form after modal will, subject-verb agreement, unnecessary copula insertion, and article omission. Translation yielded seven accurate, five partial, and three inaccurate or irrelevant responses. Within this small, uneven sample, the archived profiles displayed different proportions of complete sentence production, but no causal or correlational inference is made. The study contributes a micro-level coding approach for distinguishing lexical knowledge, structural completeness, and grammatical accuracy in elementary EFL writing.