This progress report describes a Swedish project which is seeking to develop and test materials for writing practice. Experimental materials focus on the sentence, giving students practice in the formation of more advanced constructions. Emphasis in the control program is on a variety of types of written composition (e.g., narratives,…

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 purpose of this study was to develop a sentence-combining system for teaching composition to seventh grade students. The exercises were designed so as to be independent of the students' previous knowledge of grammar. Chapter 1 examines recent studies in language and writing. The first part of chapter 2 demonstrates that normal growth in…

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

Examines the use of sentence combining as a bridge between grammar and rhetoric during the past 100 years. (MM)

This is an annotated bibliography intended to provide, for teachers of English, enough information about research and experimentation in sentence-combining to enable them to begin to use it as a pedagogical technique with some understanding of the theories and issues involved. The annotations are selective in that they summarize the information…

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

This paper examines the question of whether two labels should be used for the units traditionally called "sentence" and "clause" or whether the same label should be used and the units distinguished in some other way. Proponents of a two-level analysis have traditionally argued that sentences and clauses can have different…