Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

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);…

Two developments in 20th-century grammar are discussed, focusing on aspects that may be useful in training teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL). The two developments are (1) the large descriptive grammars based on usage surveys, which give a systematic and detailed presentation of facts of usage, and (2) procedures for analyzing a…

To help assess the writing ability of college freshmen studying English as a second language (ESL), this study was undertaken to identify particular structures of subordination associated with writing maturity and to develop a diagnostic instrument to test student control of those structures. Following sentence-generating principles of…

The research reported in this paper is concerned with three questions. Are the processes of language development complete by the time children begin school? What is the order of the emergence of control of grammatical rules? And is that order similar for first and second language learners? The data used in the analysis come from a project centered…

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…

It is believed that by focusing on the problems of advanced learners of English as a second language, implications can be drawn for issues in second language teaching and testing in general. Considerations are offered on the influence of structural linguistics and transformational generative linguistics as well as language acquisition theories on…