Today, when the author reads articles or hears discussions about teaching grammar, she finds interesting dichotomies in perspectives. Some people see language issues as right or wrong: That's it. No flexibility. This perspective is evident when people look at issues of language in stark contrasts instead of in relation to context. Another…

As teachers of writing, the authors know that choices matter: the more choices they can give their students, the better their writing will be--and the better writers they'll become. Many teachers design their courses as writing workshops, so that students make choices about the genres they compose in. They structure writing assignments so that…

A paper presented at annual convention of National Council of Teachers of English (60th, Atlanta, November 27, 1970.) (Editor)

Explains why people say "for she and I"--and argues that such usage is correct. (RS)

Describes a classroom grammatical activity in which the teacher isolates typical sentences from textbooks and writes the individual words on placards. Describes how students are each given a placard and asked to form a sentence. Reports that students enjoyed this activity and began to get the feel of language and sentence structure. (RS)

Examines the reasons for and the value of, teaching grammar through drill. Suggests other methods for teaching effective oral and written communication. (RB)

The author asserts that by integrating literature and language, students will gain deeper insights into both areas. (Author/LF)

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

Phonological rules based on "stress-terminal pattern" (the principle that a phonological phrase has one primary stress and one terminal juncture requiring a mark of punctuation) can be used to improve punctuation in composition. These rules require that the writer be able to speak sentences at a normal pace with intonation appropriate to the…

Argues that problems in teaching grammar stem from failure to help students develop, as opposed to memorize, grammatical concepts. Recommends discussion of style and vocabulary, student stylistic analysis of their own writing, and deciphering syntactic use, not just definition, of parts of speech. Suggests that such training should begin in…

Discusses how students can thoroughly understand the process of revising a few sentences by discussing revisions with a partner, reading the revisions of the same sentences by other students, and reviewing the best revisions with the whole class. (RS)

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…