Writing and writing clearly is a highly complex activity that requires the coordination of several processes and subprocesses for it to be effective and purposeful. Across those demands, syntax and the ability to express ideas with clarity can significantly affect a writer's ability to communicate (Berninger, Nagy, & Beers, 2011) and the…

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…

When being a student in grade school as well as in high school (1934-1946), grammar was heavily emphasized in English/language arts classes, particularly in grades four through the senior year in high school. Evidently, teachers and school administrators then saw a theoretical way to assist pupils in writing achievement. Grammar and writing were…

This work focuses on the licensing conditions and logical structure of understood-argument constructions, or complement-drop constructions, in English. There are two main types of such arguments: Indefinite Understood Arguments (IUA) and Definite Understood Arguments (DUA). IUA readings occur in such cases in "He ate, He cooked". In such cases,…

This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…

Students need to learn the involved patterns of sentences in the English language as well as the inherent structure. First, the paper discusses five common sentence patterns in the English language, with examples. Next, the paper deals with modifiers to extend sentences, including adjectives, adverbs, appositives, and dependent clauses. Finally,…

Presents a simplified technique for teaching students how to construct sentences using relative pronouns. (RB)

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…

This textbook is an elementary-school English grammar course. Since this book is designed for the pupil rather than for the teacher, all suggestions as to the teaching of English grammar have been conveyed rather by implication than by specific recommendation. The text itself is, however, designed to indicate a general method of presentation,…

Part two of a series on the teaching of English to adults. (DS)

The "Write a Sentence Test" was developed for use in the evaluation of student writing abilities in association with a project in Memphis, Tennessee. This paper discusses ways of administering and scoring the test, decisions concerning modification of the test, and experiences when the test was administered to sample subjects. All forms…

Developed as part of a high school quinmester unit on sentences, this guide provides the teacher with teaching strategies for a study of the acceptable patterns of kernel sentences and transformation, identification of rhetorical styles in prose and poetry, and the application of these principles to produce a variety of effective sentences. The…

In this study, fourth-grade materials based on a linguistic approach to grammar known as sector analysis were devised, field-tested, and evaluated. Two socioeconomically similar fourth grades--experimental and control groups--were pre- and post-tested to find possible changes in the complexity of their sentence structure after the experimental…

To determine the effects of oral sentence-structure exercises upon student writing, a 1-year experiment was conducted with two randomly matched fourth-grade classes of approximately equal size, one control class and one experimental class. The experimental group regularly completed exercises designed to teach students to produce sentences…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this intermediate level book are for the English subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 701 (subject/verb agreement, reversed subject…