Teaching grammar can be overwhelming and is often an overlooked part of effective instruction. "The Middle School Grammar Toolkit" to the rescue! Now in its second edition, this comprehensive guide makes grammar instruction fun and meaningful. You will learn how to: (1) Teach grammar in a practical and applicable way by presenting each…

This study examined the relationship between ninth-grade students' use of connectives (temporal, causal, adversative, and additive) in functional writing and performance on standards-based/criterion-referenced measures of reading and writing. Specifically, structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were used to examine the relationship between…

As a teacher of Bowling Green State University's English 3810, Grammar and Writing, the author is charged with teaching future language arts teachers how to teach grammar so that it actually helps their students become better writers and communicators. Because such teaching rejects the ineffective but time-honored drill-it-and-kill-it approach, in…

Graphic art can be a tough subject approach with seventh- and eighth-graders, but by mixing a little language arts into the studio lesson, they can have fun with the art of words in a whole new way. In this article, the author describes how students created a graphic design using a word. The purpose of the graphic art is to educate--to teach an…

THIS GUIDE, BASED UPON THE NEBRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER MATERIALS, IS DESIGNED TO EXPLAIN THE VOCABULARY AND BASIC ELEMENTS OF LINGUISTICS TO THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER WHO HAS HAD LITTLE OR NO FORMAL TRAINING IN LINGUISTICS. TO THIS END, A GLOSSARY OF LINGUISTIC TERMINOLOGY, GUIDING TEACHING PRINCIPLES, A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RELEVANT…

This course guide is intended for classroom use by teachers of English as a second language (ESL) to Spanish-speaking secondary school students. Each unit offers exercises and activities to facilitate increased proficiency in some aspect of English grammar or usage. The book is prefaced with a rationale to guide the teacher. Topics covered include…

Noting that issues surrounding grammar instruction are a source of controversy within the English language arts curriculum, this concept paper examines the usefulness of formal instruction in naming parts of speech, diagramming sentences, naming types of phrases and clauses, and naming sentence types. Following an introduction that defines…

As a new faculty member, the author was invited by colleagues to help protect a resource they believed was essential to their instructional program. The importance of teaching grammar in a didactic fashion as a precursor to student writing constituted an unchallenged belief in the department. Faculty members were committed to the notion that…

Exercises, tests, puzzles, enrichment activities, maps, and games are included in this student workbook for "Escaparate," the third in a series of eight Spanish reading and language instruction units developed by the Bilingual Program of Edgewood School District, San Antonio, Texas. The publication can be used as ditto sheets for duplicating or in…

Junior high school students are introduced to the standard collegiate dictionary in this mini-unit. Material is divided into teacher and student sections. The teacher section contains a list of objectives and activities, local district (California) libraries, and answer keys for student exercises. Following a rationale for learning dictionary…

Pupils need to study grammar that is useful and functional. How much stress should the language arts place upon pupils understanding the eight parts of speech in traditional grammar? Good teaching emphasizes proceeding from the concrete to the semi-concrete in teaching-learning situations, then the abstract phase of learning needs to be…

This study was designed to examine the ability of 256 above-average sixth-grade pupils to use six categories of verbal context clues in listening and reading. The extent to which success in determining deleted words was associated with the word form class membership of deleted words was also examined. A hierarchy of difficulty was established for…

The STARS (Secondary Training for Alaskan Rural Students) materials resulted from extensive rewriting of the Vocational Adult Secondary Training (VAST) materials produced by the British Columbia Department of Education, after those materials had been used with the 9th and 10th grades on Kodiak Island. Revision was done by teachers who had been…