Describes a study which found that generative rhetoric instruction produced a quantitative and qualitative increase in college students' syntactic maturity. (DD)

Compositions written by 66 second grade boys and girls in one control and two experimental groups were analyzed to study the effect of 21 instructional sessions in sentence expansion and to determine which of the instructional methods employed was most beneficial to a particular sex group. Lesson plans for the control group were parallel to two…

Discusses the continuing controversy over how to teach grammar. Finds that the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, with none clearly better than the others. Suggests that the teaching of grammar, while not the key to improvement in written English, will always have a place in the…

Because of the tentative nature of linguistic theories, the lack of proof that linguistics is an efficacious approach to language study, and the prescriptive nature of many of the books themselves, a textbook series based on linguistics is not recommended for use in the classroom. True linguists suggest theories about the structure of language and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if syntactic maturity, as measured by T-unit length, clause length, and clauses per T-unit, and if the level of reading comprehension, as measured by cloze tests and a standardized reading test, of one group each of selected fifth, seventh, and ninth graders could be influenced by the students completing…

The relevance to elementary foreign language instruction of certain findings of child language development (native language) and the psychology of language acquisition is examined. A set of premises is proposed for a new scheme for the teaching of German based on these findings, namely, that comprehension precedes production, that language…

Fourteen articles by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and linguists, bearing on the way foreign languages will be taught in the immediate future, constitute the major portion of this book. The contents include chapters on: (1) sociocultural context of language and literature, (2) Hispanic literature, (3) the use of contrastive…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: personal expressiveness in creative writing programs; generative rhetoric and writing performance; the effects of sentence combining exercises on syntactic…