Seven basic sentence constructions are presented as essentials for students progressing from beginning to advanced Japanese: equational existential, active verbal, stative verbal, sentential modifier, subordinate complex, coordinate compound. The constructions should be introduced at beginning levels, and the logical properties they share with…

Sector analysis (in which the three parts of a simple sentence are the subject, predicate, and sentence adverbial) provides clear steps for developing literal questions. Research indicates that those based on the predicate lead to more learning and better understanding. (JM)

Designed to instruct teachers as well as high school or college students in improving their writing, the Christensen Rhetoric Program is a sequential, cumulative program, published in kit form. The kit includes a script with lectures for the teacher, directions for using 200 transparencies on an overhead projector, and student workbooks which…

Transformational grammar is briefly defined in this paper, and some of the key literature on the subject is indicated. Examples of transformational operation on Spanish sentences are used to demonstrate how this approach makes the teaching-learning process easier and more efficient. (SS)

Sentence analysis by the Reed and Kellogg technique of diagraming can present the exact function of every clause in the sentence, of every phrase in the clause, and of every word in the phrase. Furthermore, it can teach the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order, and it is from the teacher that the student learns…

Two grammars (traditional and transformational) and two methods of teaching (direct and indirect) were measured to determine their effects upon the writing performance of students of low socioeconomic backgrounds. While the direct teaching of grammar was concerned with the correction of specific errors, the indirect teaching was concerned with a…

Since clauses are the largest functional components of a sentence, their analysis can increase attention to sentence structure and stylistic variation. Students can learn to distinguish main clause types by naming the verb forms used (transitive, intransitive, equational, and passive). Once students have mastered the recognition of main clauses,…

This article deals with teaching vocabulary to advanced students of English through collocation, i.e., teaching a word in meaningful contexts. Ten collocation exercises are provided. (AM)

This study investigated the possibility of training or improving intrasentence organizational skills (i.e., those that enable the reader to encode and process verbal information in higher-order units) and explored the effects that training had on reading comprehension. The subjects were 31 third graders, 16 experimental students and 15 control…

A discussion of a semantic approach to teaching these particles. The meaning of -zhe can be best characterized as "incompleteness.' Another characteristic of -zhe in a simple sentence is to change an action verb into a stative one. -Ne in conjunction with -zhe mitigates the incompleteness represented by -zhe. (Author/AMH)

Seven hundred and fifty compositions, randomly selected from National Assessment of Educational Progress essays written by 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds, were analyzed in a study of the skills that go into the writing of a good composition. The essays were first rated as high, medium, or low in quality. A total of 43 different indices reported or…