Shows that grammar teaching fails not merely because of faulty teaching methods or imperfect knowledge of English grammar; it fails because of the inherent nature of language and the nature of the students to whom grammar is taught. Argues that it should not be taught until the last years of high school. (EL)

Students' abilities in manipulation and control of syntax may be increased through a sequence of instruction involving the use of exercises termed "Non-Sentence Practice,""Nonsense-Sentences Practice," and "Syntactic Patterning Practice." The final step in the instruction sequence is to make the syntactic exercises pertinent to students' writing…

BELIEVING FORMAL WRITTEN ENGLISH TO BE A "FOREIGN LANGUAGE" TO MOST AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS, RESEARCHERS USED THE AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION TO PROMOTE WRITING IMPROVEMENT IN FOURTH-GRADERS. TWO RANDOMLY-SELECTED CLASSES OF STUDENTS OF AVERAGE ABILITY COMPOSED THE STUDY POPULATION--ONE CLASS FOR THE EXPERIMENT,…

The purposes of this study were (1) to provide a method for the quantitative study of grammatical (syntactic) structures which is coherent, systematic, and broad, yet capable of refinement to accommodate details, and (2) to search for the developmental trends in the frequency of various grammatical structures written by students of average…

An attempt to fill the gap between the purely theoretical and the purely practical, this book provides the classroom teacher with a set of principles for using linguistics in devising and evaluating teaching techniques. Briefly, the chapters (1) present some special learning principles that distinguish language learning from other types of…

This study (partially supported by an ESEA Title III Grant) of the written composition of 190 above-average children in grades 3-6 was carried out to determine whether those children who were taught selected concepts of invention, arrangement, and style over a period of 8 months would demonstrate significant improvement in composition or sentence…

This is an annotated bibliography intended to provide, for teachers of English, enough information about research and experimentation in sentence-combining to enable them to begin to use it as a pedagogical technique with some understanding of the theories and issues involved. The annotations are selective in that they summarize the information…