A teacher asks her learners to join sentences to make a short paragraph,…

Writing instruction in ELT is often organised as a continuum from tightly controlled, teacher-supplied tasks to fully independent composition. Early tasks constrain what learners write — the sentence content, the connectors, the structure — so learners can focus on correctness and cohesion; later tasks progressively withdraw that support until learners compose on their own.

In the activity described, the teacher supplies the sentences and the connecting words (but, and, however, because, although) and asks learners only to combine them into a coherent paragraph. This is a guided, teacher-controlled task placed near the controlled end of that continuum, used as one stage in progressively moving learners toward independent paragraph writing — which is exactly what the term for the overall approach names.

• "Control composition" (as offered) names only a single guided-exercise type — manipulating or completing pre-set sentence material — not the overall staged approach to teaching writing the question asks about.

• "Free-writing approach" means learners generate their own content and connectors without any supplied material — the opposite of the teacher-supplied sentences and connectors used here.

• "Communicative approach" is a broader language-teaching methodology built around meaningful interaction and real-world communication, not around sentence-level guided writing drills.

Result: joining teacher-supplied sentences with given connectors, used as a stepping stone toward independent writing, is the Controlled-to-free writing approach.