Mastering sentence-construction skills is essential to learning to write. Limited sentence-construction skills may hinder a writer's ability to translate ideas into text. It may also inhibit or interfere with other composing processes, as developing writers must devote considerable cognitive effort to sentence construction. The authors examined…

Children from non-English-speaking homes are doubly disadvantaged when learning English in school. They enter school with less prior knowledge of English sounds, word meanings, and sentence structure, and they get little or no reinforcement of their learning outside of the classroom. This article compares the classroom standard practice of…