This study presents an overall review of the paradigms that contribute to the making and development of functional human linguistics and communication skills and the teaching of language.

Transformational grammar offers the most adequate system by which to meet the goal of grammar instruction, which is to increase the student's understanding of the nature of language. This grammar attempts to explain the mental processes underlying the production and understanding of sentences, to describe linguistic competence, to construct…

These two units of the Minnesota Project English curriculum employ transformational grammar in an attempt to make eighth-grade students aware of fundamental facts about their language. Concepts taught in the first unit are (1) that an infinite number of English sentences exists, (2) that a few basic transformations are the basis for a large number…

A criticism, in part, of A.M. Tibbets' The Grammatical Revolution That Failed," Elementary English," vol. 45, no. 1 (January 1968), p 44-50. (RD)

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

This book had two goals: to provide an introduction to transformational-generative grammar, placing it into a historical and philosophical context with other earlier linguistic traditions, and to provide a survey of the elements of English grammar from a transformational point of view. The text is intended for anyone who wishes to know the basis…

Contemporary syntactic theory rejects the idea that prescriptive grammar can provide students with any insights into how language works. For generative grammar, a term for the aggregate of methodologies which currently dominates modern linguistics, rules determining the grammaticality of a sentence do not relate in any way to the rules which make…

For secondary English teachers concerned with the theoretical and practical problems of the traditional approaches to teaching grammar, this paper proposes that a realistic solution can be found in current linguistic investigation. This solution lies not in the product of linguistic inquiry, but in the process of inquiry itself. The paper first…

Suggests that the discovery procedure of data gathering and hypothesizing could be more effective as a means of teaching language arts skills than traditional grammar and new English'' methods. (DS)

Individualized lessons, based upon inferred instructional goals of The Roberts English Series," were developed by Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs (PLAN). (RD)

BECAUSE OF LIMITATIONS DURING THE ACTUAL STUDY, THIS PROJECT WAS DELIMITED TO THE STUDY OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING MATERIALS ADAPTED FROM STRUCTURAL AND GENERATIVE GRAMMARS UPON THE ABILITY OF SEVENTH-GRADE STUDENTS TO WRITE MORE MATURE COMPOSITIONS. FORTY-THREE STUDENTS WERE GIVEN EXPERIMENTAL LINGUISTICALLY-ORIENTED MATERIALS DESIGNED TO…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

Version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, NOvember 1969, in Washington, D.C. (DS)

Maintains that students' understanding of the language structure" is of relatively low priority in elementary language arts education. (Author/RD)