The National Center for Leadership in Intensive Intervention (NCLII), a consortium funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), prepares special education leaders to become experts in research on intensive intervention for students with disabilities who have persistent and severe academic (e.g., reading and math) and behavioral…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether sentence combining with an explicit metalinguistic approach in comparison to typical science instruction was effective in improving written expression and understanding of comparison/contrast in science for eighth-grade students who struggle with literacy. Method: Eighty-four eighth-grade…

About 10 years ago, Robert J. Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" questioned the disappearance of writing style and examined the validity of some of the reasons given for its disappearance. Since that 2000 article, the study of style has undergone a kind of renaissance, with numerous books and articles on its uses in composition theory…

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has…

Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…

Teaching children to write successfully is an area of great concern to educators in the 21 st century. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, the writing skills of two-thirds of the students in elementary, middle, and high school are below grade level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). In 2003, the…

Describes transformational grammar and contends that it is more efficient for teaching rhetoric than traditional grammar. (DD)

Describes a series of problems based on transformational grammar which are helpful in teaching students how to write. (DD)

Demonstrates key concepts of transformational generative grammar that can be applied to a discussion of the composing process. Discusses relevant linguistic concepts and selected transformational processes to illustrate how writers achieve certain effects. (RL)

This study presents an argument against the identification of speech as the sole source of data for linguistic research. Specifically, the issue addressed is whether speech and reading and writing can be considered expressions of one language or whether the obvious differences in the terminal symbol strings in the two types of expression are…

Critically analyzes Paul J. Schafer's advocacy (in Return to Normalcy," Elementary English," vol. 47, no. 5 (May 1970), p. 671--see TE 200 730) of a return to the teaching of traditional grammar. (SW)

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…