Systematic practice improved story-writing skills of first-grade subjects. (JH)

Classroom spelling programs should grow out of the children's individual needs and include various writing opportunities. (JH)

The present study tested four research hypotheses dealing with sentence-combining (SC) practice as a component of the language arts curriculum. It examined the progress of 100 seventh graders over a period of three months. No formal instruction in grammar was included. Four classes, controlled for ability, sex, and teacher effect, followed a…

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)

This book contends that systematic oral and written exercises enable students to overcome many difficulties encountered in writing English. The first chapter is a general discussion of the teaching of composition today. The second section describes an experiment in oral composition drills in a seventh-grade class. The third section describes the…

Demonstrated effectiveness in eliciting growth in number of words per T-unit through the use of sentence-combining exercises in a college composition course and related frequency of embedding errors to data on length of T-unit. (DD)

Three studies suggest that students involved in observational activities increase the level of specificity in their writing after only 10 to 15 days of instruction and are judged to be more creative. (DD)

Level 2 of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Composition Skills Program is designed to help children achieve writing fluency and elementary punctuation skills. This report describes the results of the 1971-1972 developmental tryouts of the program in a wide range of school locations. Data obtained from the tryout corroborated data obtained…

This evaluation of a theme-every-day writing experience concludes that such a project has some values which reward the time a class spends preparing, reading, and giving feedback. Chapter one describes the teaching method and several features of the community college in which the theme-every-day approach to teaching composition was used. Chapter…

One of a series of guides to the teaching of writing at the elementary and secondary levels, this publication describes grammar activities that relate to writing activities. The introductory sections define major approaches to grammar, summarize the current state of research on the relation of formal grammar to composition, and suggest behavioral…

This document discusses a study of 36 level 3 exercises tried out in a single, middle-income, suburban, second-grade classroom. The following outcomes were generated for the exercises: capitalize the first letter of a sentence, correctly end sentences with periods or question marks, capitalize proper nouns, correctly use commas in dates and…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…

In order to study the complexity of sentence combining in college students, 32 students from five basic composition courses were asked to perform three writing tasks at three distinct times during the eight-week instructional period. Each student was asked to rewrite a passage of kernel sentences, to write a composition in the argumentative mode,…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The introduction describes an analysis of predication that offers teachers insights into ways of helping students develop an expository thesis and study more…