The freshman composition course at Mayville State College (North Dakota) progresses from basic grammar to sentence combining to the development of expository writing skills based on the principles of generative rhetoric. The course begins with a brief review of grammar, emphasizing the phrase, clause, and sentence, and then moves on to the process…

Students can improve their writing skills by studying grammar. In learning to apply a logical system in their analysis of sentence parts, for example, students develop mental discipline. This discipline can be strengthened through the grammatical analysis of their own papers. In these evaluations, which include error and stylistic analyses and a…

The advantages of a knowledge-based computer program that creates exercises for language instruction rather than presenting pre-stored materials are discussed, and one such system, ILIAD, is described. Designed to address a broad range of language learning needs, this system can be used by people learning English as a second language and by…

Generative rhetoric is an essential part of any composition program or instruction in written language that begins with the preschool child and continues through the freshman year of college and beyond. Applying the principles of generative rhetoric to selected essays and student performance established the need to maintain the place of generative…

The history of instructional material development for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction in the United States is chronicled through five different instructional approaches: the audiolingual approach (late 1940s to early 1960s); transformational grammar (early 1960s to the present); Total Physical Response (late 1970s to the present);…

This discussion of the use of computer programming in syntactic analysis covers three major points: (1) a review of basic notions in automatic grammars; (2) a description of the grammar used in a pilot project which analysed the linguistic content of methods of teaching foreign languages; and (3) proposals on the application of the same techniques…

A computer-based set of instructional materials, designed to teach English second-language reading skills to university-level engineering students, is described and its development is outlined. The programmed units are designed to be used individually on the computer. The stages of software development included: selection of sentence units from…