The purpose of this research was to determine the effects of Cardio-Syntactic Analysis instruction on writing scores in an 11th grade English class. The sample consisted of 35 students enrolled in an Honor's English 11 class at Volunteer high School, in Church Hill, TN. The class was randomly assigned into an experimental group of 17 students and…

Discusses and illustrates three rule sets suitable for presenting generative grammar to beginners; and appendix to the author's article with the same title in the February 1970 (No. 13) issue, pp. 39-53; see TE 200 767. (Editor/SW)

Transformational grammar offers the most adequate system by which to meet the goal of grammar instruction, which is to increase the student's understanding of the nature of language. This grammar attempts to explain the mental processes underlying the production and understanding of sentences, to describe linguistic competence, to construct…

These two units of the Minnesota Project English curriculum employ transformational grammar in an attempt to make eighth-grade students aware of fundamental facts about their language. Concepts taught in the first unit are (1) that an infinite number of English sentences exists, (2) that a few basic transformations are the basis for a large number…

This "new English grammar" textbook blends four systems of grammar: (1) the traditional, providing most of the terminology; (2) the historical, providing the historical background; (3) the structural, providing the sentence patterns; and (4) the transformational, providing the variations of the sentence patterns. The author points out the…

The difficulty of obtaining usable information about the mental processes involved in the use of language has been a major obstacle in the design of effective writing programs. The antipsychological, behavioristic bias of American linguistics, which prevented any study of the deeper mental processes of language production, was remediated in part…

After considering the implications of the back-to-the-basics movement, the author concludes that there is little value in going "back" to approaches such as those typical of traditional grammar instruction. Instead, he suggests that sentence combining offers a basic approach to the teaching of writing. An experiment which began with four classes…

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…

Version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, NOvember 1969, in Washington, D.C. (DS)

Based on the assumption that awareness of certain aspects of underlying structure is basic to comprehending the meaning of a sentence, the module described in this report (English Sentence Structure: Programmed Exercises) is designed to increase the learner's awareness of English syntactic structure. The materials follow a programmed format with…

Sensitivity to syntactic structure can be increased by direct instruction. (JH)

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO COMPARE THE COMPLEXITY OF WRITTEN COMPOSITIONS OF FIFTH-GRADE STUDENTS IN A LINGUISTICALLY-ORIENTED LANGUAGE ARTS PROGRAM WITH THE COMPLEXITY OF THE WRITTEN COMPOSITIONS OF STUDENTS WHO WERE TAUGHT TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR. AN EXPERIMENTAL GROUP AND A CONTROL GROUP WERE EACH COMPOSED OF 32 STUDENTS AND WERE EQUALIZED…

TWO TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE APPROACHES TO TEACHING SYNTAX IN JUNIOR AND SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLS ARE PRESENTED. ONE IS FOR USE WITH AVERAGE AND TALENTED STUDENTS IN GRADES 7-9, AND THE OTHER IS FOR SLOW-LEARNING STUDENTS IN GRADES 7-11. A DISCUSSION OF THE FIRST APPROACH IS DIVIDED BY GRADE LEVEL AND INCLUDES AN EXAMINATION OF BASIC SENTENCE…

The goal of these two seventh-grade language units is to provide some basic understanding about the structure and complexity of the English language and about the human ability to handle that language in ordinary speech situations. The first unit inductively presents a set of ordered rules which follow the conventions of modern symbolic logic and…

THIS STUDY REPORTS AN EXPERIMENT ON THE HYPOTHESIS THAT GRAMMAR-RELATED SENTENCE-COMBINING PRACTICE WILL MEANINGFULLY ENHANCE THE NORMAL GROWTH OF SYNTACTIC FLUENCY. TRADITIONAL STUDIES ON ERROR THERAPY AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE ARE REVIEWED, AND DESIGN AND RATIONALE ARE INFERRED FROM THE RESEARCH OF BATEMAN AND ZIDONIS. RULE LEARNING, PATTERN…