Understanding the structure of the English language can assist learners in getting the feeling for what comes next sequentially in oral or silent reading. Noting that the structure of knowledge movement during the 1960s-1970s emphasized the selection of what is relevant and important to teach and that pupils learn ideas inductively, this paper…

Describes a technique for introducing the basics of grammar into a college freshman composition course, in which the instructor correlated grammatical structures with students' personality types. (HTH)

Offers rules and comments for using discourse analysis to teach student writers how to convert incoherent compositions into coherent, cohesive prose. (RL)

Guidelines for connecting the rhetorical principles taught by Francis Christensen with concepts from sentence-combining in a plan to help students learn to invent and develop sentences. (RL)

Describes a module used to teach ESL students to distinguish phrases from clauses and sentences from nonsentences or fragments, thus enabling them to edit the errors of punctuation out of their writing. A chart of four grammatical units in a hierarchy (single words, groups of words, clauses, and sentences) is included. (Author/PJM)

Presents a writing mini-lesson for primary and intermediate elementary school students that encourages them to spend more time on verbs and less time on details in order to improve their overall writing. A sidebar provides a list of useful children's books. (SM)

This workbook offers a variety of quick language activities that are designed to develop grade 2-4 students' associative-reasoning and problem-solving skills. The activities in the workbook cover vocabulary development, classifying, sequencing, following directions, and word recognition. Sections of the workbook are Categories; Ordering;…

Sentence combining techniques can be used with basal readers to help students develop writing skills. The first technique is addition, characterized by using the connecting word "and" to join two or more base sentences together. The second technique is called "embedding," and is characterized by putting parts of two or more base sentences together…

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)

Presents a three-stage process for teaching the logical relationships that exist in paragraphs to aid high school students in differentiating main ideas from subordinate statements. (MKM)

Presents tips for teaching English-as-a-Second-Language students. Suggestions, complete with information on materials required, include preparing dialogs, poems on feelings, and sentences that grow. (LB)

Hypothesizing that students choosing their own topics would produce significantly more writing, a study examined the writing sample length of 42 sixth grade students who had been divided equally into two treatment groups. Treatments were counterbalanced so that during the first writing period students in one group wrote on topics they had selected…

The book is an attempt to create an appreciation of the complex Lushootseed language, spoken by American Indians in the area between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains northward to the Skagit River Valley. The book is divided into two parts: readings about Lushootseed life and a brief description of the Lushootseed language. The readings, taken…

An evaluation of the t-unit as the basic unit of analysis of second language development in written form argues that despite the t-unit's advantages, the sentence-based analysis is superior for examining syntactic complexity in at least three ways: (1) it better characterizes learner knowledge; (2) it facilitates comparison across learners and…

The use of the Logo programing language in natural language manipulation provides the basis for the development of the computer-assisted grammar instruction program for children that is described in this paper. The computer activities suggested are designed to get children in grades 4-12 to formulate rules of grammar based on their own knowledge…