The divisions in transformational grammar into surface and deep structure give rise to the hypothesis that imitative-repetitive drills will never go beyond the surface structure, and that an explicit verbalization of underlying structures will result in better achievement and proficiency in second language learning. The Project described here,…

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began…