There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

English is widely recognized as an international language for education communication, which has led to the development of several English for Academic Purposes (EAP) subjects for Thai students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL), especially in specialized school programs. The primary objective of these EAP subjects is to prepare Thai…

The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for second graders at risk for academic failure, which taught reading comprehension embedded in social studies content. The intervention included instruction about the structure of cause/effect expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and close…

With tips on punctuation, style, grammar and essay structure, this handy guide provides succinct and practical guidance on students most common areas of concern in their written work. Each tip is supplemented by authentic examples of student writing, suggested re-writes, and appropriate self-help exercises. This book contains four parts. Part I:…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

Describes a teaching sequence in which students are taught to write as if they were readers and read as if they were the writers. (HOD)

Describes the results of an analysis of 87 non-formulaic abstracts for structures of semantic dependency between sentences. An automatic structural simplification is presented which is based on an assumption about the use of the dependency structure, and the results of an evaluation of the method are discussed. (25 references) (CLB)

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

A principal components analysis was conducted to determine whether the measures of essays made by the computer could be grouped into factors. Six factors (fluency, spelling, diction, sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraphing) were identified. (Author)

Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

This exercise is intended to teach the sense of sentences and their place in the larger fabric of paragraphs as they are woven into organized papers. Based on the five-paragraph theme (introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion), the exercise divides "What I Haved Lived For," the prologue to "The Autobiography of Bertrand…

The two essays in this booklet reflect the spirit and ideas of Francis Christensen, specifically his exhortations to composition teachers, illustrated by his own practice, to approach the teaching of writing inductively, to look always to the writing of professionals for models, and to behave as scholars. The first essay, on sentence modelling,…

In spite of the growth in popularity of sentence combining over the last 20 years, few teachers use it in technical writing classes, either because the exercises are inappropriate or because teachers fear that sentence combining will teach students to write longer rather than better sentences. Sentence combining can, however, teach technical…