In order to account for the ways in which combined and decombined sentences work, and to determine why some texts are perceived as being well-written and others are perceived as poor and ineffective, 11 texts were selected for distribution to students for ranking, all on the same topic--the Civil War. Overall, students ranked Bruce Catton's "Grant…

Current research in reading indicates that what the reader brings to the printed page is far more important to comprehension than the information appearing there. This paper presents a model of how the integration of reading and writing skills can be undertaken, thereby strengthening both skill areas. With selections from a literary text and a…

In spite of a number of unanswered questions regarding its place in the teaching of composition and the lack of agreement on why it is effective, sentence combining (SC) has become accepted as a useful skill building technique in regular composition classes. Attempting a broader context on the college level, SC was used exclusively to teach every…

Sample sentence-combining lessons developed to accompany the first-year A-LM German textbook are presented. The exercises are designed for language manipulation practice; they involve breaking down more complex sentences into simpler sentences and the subsequent recombination into complex sentences. All language skills, and particularly writing,…

An experiment on relative clause formation involving Cantonese students who were learning English was conducted. The study sought to determine whether sentence combining exercises would help Chinese students construct long relative clauses instead of the short relative clauses that exist in their first language. For the experimental group each…

The workbook is designed for teaching Melanesian Pidgin English (Tokpisin) sentence structure to Peace Corps volunteers. It addresses sentence structures that are common to most languages, and uses listening, speaking, translation, and other grammar drills and exercises to reinforce learning. The approach used assumes that a native speaker is…