Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, November 1970, in Los Angeles, California. (DS)

Offers a critical review of arguments for and against T-unit analysis in second language research. Maintains that T-unit length is a valid measure of syntactic complexity and a true index of overall development in second language acquisition. (PMJ)

Suggests that for improving syntactic fluency and the overall quality of compositions, exercises should be based on generative rhetoric. These exercises in which students supply the content of the sentence from a list of suggested structures are superior to sentence-combining exercises that provide the student with all the information. (PMJ)

Analyzed the spoken and written language of Caribbean college students who consider themselves to be native speakers of English. Discusses the students' linguistic self-perception as well as the morphosyntactic and discourse features that emerge when they write in standard English. The study suggests that anglophone Caribbean students should be…