Discusses the need for both a "rule of thumb" grammar and more thorough grammatical rules in second language teaching. (AM)

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

Sixty-two quantitative, lexical, and syntactic features in a corpus of 160 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) texts were identified and counted, producing 28 text variables that were compared with ESL proficiency levels of the writers. Results suggest pedagogical implications for ESL composition instructors. (Contains 12 references.) (LB)

Discusses a study that attempted to create and test the validity of an error analysis model usable by high school teachers. Results indicate that, in themes that do not contain significant mechanical errors, syntactical errors do not lead to a breakdown of meaning. Numerous syntactical errors, however, do create comprehension problems. (15…

This action research study evaluates a classroom approach incorporating a reflective, metacognitive component within a second language process-oriented writing environment. Inspired by the literature and developed by the first author, this approach seeks to provide English language learners (ELLs) with a command of metalinguistic principles…

The merits of recasts have been widely debated and investigated in and out of the language classroom. This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of recasts in comparison to prompts and no corrective feedback on francophone learners' acquisition of English third person possessive determiners. Sixty-four students from three intact intensive…

Urges the combination of grammatical instruction with pragmatic spoken usage in the teaching of language. (LG)

Full reading comprehension is dependent on a knowledge of language usage, specifically, how syntactic constructions function in relation to pragmatic knowledge. To avoid some of the problems which might arise concerning the pragmatic aspects of reading comprehension, the following steps may be taken: teach children very early the relationship…

Both in standard factors of syntactic maturity and in measures of overall writing quality, first year college students trained in sentence combining achieved significantly higher scores than students following a conventional curriculum. (DD)

The treatment group of college freshmen, which worked with the Strong-Christensen sentence-combining materials during an intensive six-week period, scored significantly higher on two factors of syntactic maturity than the control group. (DD)

Discusses the importance of two Firthian themes for language teaching. The first theme, "Restricted Languages," concerns the "microlanguages" of every language (e.g., literary language, scientific, etc.). The second theme, "Collocation," shows that equivalent words in two languages rarely have the same position in…

Problems encountered in attempting to teach the Spanish verb system can be traced to misconceptions arising from the inadequate or misleading names of many of the tenses. The nature of descriptive terminology is the level at which the problem of nomenclature is treated in this study. (SL)