Since introducing a grammar unit can be daunting and frustrating for both teachers and students, a collaborative unit for a 10th-grade class was planned that would satisfy an administrative requirement but also maintain the integrity of the writing program. The unit was planned by developing an approach of non-intrusive grammar instruction at the…

A construction occurring in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is examined: NPi "call" NPi V"-ing", as in "the woman call herself working." First, a number of reasons that such a form might be overlooked or dismissed as an AAVE dialect form are outlined. Then the sociolinguistic method is applied to the…

A discussion of English-speaking children's use of subjectless sentences contrasts the competence and performance explanations for the phenomenon. In particular, it reviews evidence indicating that the phenomenon does not reflect linguistic competence, but rather performance constraints. A tentative model of children's production is presented…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT (Except for the Evaluation Summary Table): VERSION: Apple II. PRODUCER: Micro Power & Light Company, 12820 Hillcrest Rd., Suite 224, Dallas, Texas 75230. EVALUATION COMPLETED: June 1982 by the staff and constituents of the Portland Public Schools, Multnomah ESD, Portland, Oregon. COST: $24.95.…

The phenomena of null subjects in child grammars of English are examined in the context of Nina Moss Hyams' proposals about these structures within the framework of generative grammar. Some problems with these analyses are examined and an alternative analysis is proposed. It is noted that Hyams predicts that children learning a language requiring…

The "Write a Sentence Test" was developed for use in the evaluation of student writing abilities in association with a project in Memphis, Tennessee. This paper discusses ways of administering and scoring the test, decisions concerning modification of the test, and experiences when the test was administered to sample subjects. All forms…

It is argued that informed judgments by a thoughtful teacher may have advantages over the application of a readability formula in assessing the linguistic difficulty of a text. Examples are given. (KC)

Dominant features of the rhetoric used in the "American Educational Research Journal" (AERJ) are discussed to illustrate how arguments are constructed and how a conception of the world of education is formed. These features include conventions of format; impersonalized and passive sentence constructions; and references to prior research.…

An often-noted contrast between child and adult language is that young children produce sentences both with and without lexical subjects even if subjects are obligatory in the adult system. However, in Dutch, there is no such structural difference between the earliest stages of Dutch child grammar and the adult stage where subjects are concerned.…

Since its inception, proponents of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) have claimed the superiority of the analyses that the theory makes available for certain problematic constructions in English. Two examples of such constructions are (1) rightward unbounded dependencies (including right node raising) and (2) parasitic gaps. However, as…

Data presented in this report are the results of the special assessment of writing mechanics conducted during the 1978-79 school year by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS). The purposes of the study were (1) to examine writing abilities of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students enrolled…

Comparison of production and comprehension methods in teaching six 3-year-old language disordered children the relationship between semantic role and word order indicated the production method (the children produced sentences contrasting word order and meaning) was more effective than the comprehension method (the children responded to contrasting…

Examines the claim that some students of English as a Second Language allow English reflexives to be bound by long-distance (LD) antecedents even when such LD binding is underdetermined for these learners with respect to their first-language grammar(s) and the second-language input. The article discusses why the claim's underlying data do not…

In this study, African American English (AAE)-speaking children's comprehension of 2 different types of double negative sentences was examined and contrasted with that of a comparison group of Standard American English (SAE)-speaking children. The first type of double negative, negative concord, involves 2 negative elements in a sentence that are…

To compare Japanese autistic children's use of semantic knowledge and theory of mind with mentally retarded and typically developing children's, they were tested on their comprehension of active and passive sentences and false belief understanding. Autistic children were sensitive to plausibility levels of semantic bias as were 4-year-olds with…