A modified language arts curriculum has resulted from the contributions of linguists. Language arts teachers need to be thoroughly versed in content and methodology recommendations made by linguists. It is important for pupils to understand patterns of sentences in the English language. Pupils should also attach meaning to the concept of expanding…

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…

This paper describes a demonstration of a totally integrated discovery procedure to present sentence-combining practice. This practice makes students aware not only of the complex structures but of the usage and style related to each structure. Guidelines for the execution of the practice include: (1) the use of a sequence of questions by the…

In comparing research results and current textbook practices regarding the acquisition of relative clauses in a second language, it was found that there is a discrepancy between the approaches presented by textbooks and those taken by learners. A pedagogical approach was developed and tested which closely reflects what learners do. The results of…

This document traces the history of sentence combining, from Ney's study in 1966 and Mellon's study in 1969 to recent research conducted by Ney and supported by the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. Studies by O'Hare (1973), Ney (1975), Combs (1975), Perron (1974), Green (1972), Hunt and O'Donnell (1969), Miller…

Teaching students the traditional terminology for sentences is unnecessary and provides them little or no help in improving their writing. This paper outlines the most common difficulties in students' sentences and describes a simplified working vocabulary for teaching students how to solve their sentence problems. The paper shows the methods and…

Examined whether instruction on a single structure (the relative clause, the appositive, and the infinitive nominal) would alter frequency of use or global syntactic complexity and whether this instruction lasted beyond the immediate posttest. (HOD)

Theory and research indicated that sentence-combining exercises (SCE's) might be effective for improving the writing of learning disabled (LD) pupils. Seven college seniors in special education were trained to implement SCE's naturalistically in tutoring 13 LD pupils in grades 1-6 over a 10 week period, with a control group of 8 seniors tutoring…

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…

Suggests that work with the cumulative sentence can have an immediate and profound impact on student writing in the areas of grammar, organization, and specificity. Finds the use of the cumulative sentence helpful as a sentence-combining technique and for several other aspects of composition and grammar. (MS)

Proposes that while teachers are teaching students how to write more complex sentences, they provide students with the techniques to read increasingly more complex sentences as well. (DD)

Examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s (the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining) and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. Concludes that this erasure of sentence…

Sentence combining can teach students one of the most difficult aspects of the writing process--how to construct effective, versatile sentences. In sentence combining exercises, students take a series of short sentences and combine them into a longer and more elaborate sentence in such a way that the important information from each short sentence…

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…

This progress report describes a Swedish project which is seeking to develop and test materials for writing practice. Experimental materials focus on the sentence, giving students practice in the formation of more advanced constructions. Emphasis in the control program is on a variety of types of written composition (e.g., narratives,…