Discusses the continuing controversy over how to teach grammar. Finds that the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, with none clearly better than the others. Suggests that the teaching of grammar, while not the key to improvement in written English, will always have a place in the…

A project to investigate the effects on the language development of secondary school pupils of a study of transformational grammar as represented in the Oregon English Curriculum involved 250 students in a large, coeducational high school near Auckland, New Zealand. The students were divided into three matched groups who studied different English…

This study examines eight evaluative abstracts on grammar instruction, to determine the effects of such instruction on student writing and to trace the development of sentence-combining instruction, which helps students write with increased syntactic maturity. On the basis of the evaluative abstracts, the study concludes that traditional grammar…