Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

Intended for the adult who needs writing skills for career purposes, this three-part book presents principles rather than mechanical rules for achieving effective communication through writing. The first section of the book offers specific guidelines on communicative attitude, content, perspective, theme, organization, and revision. The middle…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

R-QUAF (Rapid Question and Answer Formation) is a device which enables the English as a second language (ESL) class to systematically review previously studied sentence patterns in a brisk and lively way. The technique revolves around a wall chart with cue words for questions running down the left-hand side (to elicit the various structures to be…

In a study using eye-voice span (EVS) measures to determine the relationship between the types and numbers of transformations in sentences and the predictability of the sentences for readers, sentences with varying types and numbers of transformations were embedded in paragraphs projected onto a screen and read aloud by the subjects, 20 graduate…

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

A review of the literature reveals that three writing skills have been of particular interest to writing researchers recently. First, work on planning the rhetorical strategy recognizes three components of the planning process: prewriting, pausing, and reviewing what has been written. Second, research on audience analysis indicates that maturity…

A study examined student writing from the point of view of each of three language functions: the expressive function (the evidence of the individual writer), the appeal function (evidence of a particular listener or audience), and the representative function (attention to the topic). While speaking, students have a clear sense of the three…

Student projects that involve writing generative grammars in the computer language, "LOGO," are described in this paper, which presents a grammar-running control structure that allows students to modify and improve the grammar interpreter itself while learning how a simple kind of computer parser works. Included are procedures for…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…

This assumption that non-standard speakers are limited in their linguistic ability is examined based on a larger study investigating the speech of working-class adolescents in Sydney, Australia's inner-city areas. Speech samples of four children are presented. An examination of verbal structures reveals that there is a predominance of simple…

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

BELIEVING FORMAL WRITTEN ENGLISH TO BE A "FOREIGN LANGUAGE" TO MOST AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS, RESEARCHERS USED THE AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION TO PROMOTE WRITING IMPROVEMENT IN FOURTH-GRADERS. TWO RANDOMLY-SELECTED CLASSES OF STUDENTS OF AVERAGE ABILITY COMPOSED THE STUDY POPULATION--ONE CLASS FOR THE EXPERIMENT,…

As one of five modules focusing on specific writing skills, this learning module on the sentence is intended for use in a one-semester course on written communication or as a supplement to other courses where written communication skills are included. The materials, designed so that they may be used in either a teacher-directed or an…

This guide provides an evaluation system by which a teacher or parent can follow a child's progress in sentence structure, usage, punctuation, capitalization, penmanship, and composition from kindergarten through grade eight. Each page lists an objective that is coded so that it is possible to correlate related materials, such as test items,…