Children with limited language expression and comprehension abilities are at risk for academic failure, particularly in literacy acquisition. In addition, these children often have poor social outcomes, including difficulty forming friendships, social exclusion, withdrawal, and victimization. The academic and social difficulties that these…

Vast amounts of daily news content are widely available and easily accessible, and they can be converted into materials for intermediate and advanced ESL classes. This article will describe the why and how for integrating news media sources into a multiskills ESL classroom. Through the news, students are immediately engaged with the material…

The number of native Arabic-speaking students coming to America to study English in university programs has grown over the past few years, and continues to be substantial. It has also been noticed by the English Language Institute (ELI) at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) that these students often struggle more with reading activities in class,…

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 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)

Second in a series of books designed to make learning to write and understanding the structure of language easy and fun, this book gives students the opportunity to see how each of the parts of speech functions in a sentence. The focus of the book is twofold: to help students learn to recognize and write complete sentences and to familiarize…

Describes a technique that draws upon popular children's literature to help children learn more complex sentence structures through a sentence modeling cycle. Lists books that are appropriate for use with the technique. (FL)

First in a series of books that illustrate the functions of words in sentences, this book uses cartoon characters (a different "Humpty" for each part of speech) to help make learning grammar easier by associating an abstract concept with a visual image. The book introduces each part of speech and offers practice pages where students can reinforce…

Causal conjunctions that form a grammatical bridge between simple and complex sentences can be either plus or minus causal conjunctions. The category of plus causal conjunctions includes a "because" group (since, as, because of, owing to, due to, as a result of, as a consequence of) and a "so" group (therefore, hence, consequently, accordingly, as…

Describes a sentence expansion technique found to be an effective and motivating way to teach sentence structure and vocabulary to elementary school students. (SR)

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)

In this article a method to improve sentence writing ability called sentence combining is explained. The potential effects of sentence combining are related and relevant research summarized. In addition, how to introduce sentence combining practice to a class, key instructional components including oral practice and peer assistance, sources of…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

Most students today have been reared on television and have had only slight brushes with the parts of grammar. Nevertheless, a variety of sentence pattern exercises and sentence combining lessons based on the students' own writing can be used to augment, challenge and improve students' writing skills and vocabulary. In the first exercise, students…