An experimental study investigating the interaction of linguistic complexity and performance in child language acquisition tests the hypothesis that children learning a first language acquire relatively complex sentences somewhat later than less complex sentences. In one of three tests, the subjects, 44 children aged 3.6 to 6 years, were presented…

Methods for teaching students to recognize and manipulate structures of cohesion in reading materials are discussed. Teaching students to connect text involves a strategy that combines reading and writing in student- and teacher-directed activities. An example illustrates how the strategy can be applied with specific course content, a ninth-grade…

A study compared the influences of rhetorical and sentence-level features on holistic essay scores assigned by raters who are experienced writing instructors but not trained in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. In scoring six university-level essays, these raters placed emphasis on ESL sentence-level errors far more than on essays'…

Reports on a study of "considerateness" of five fifth-grade social studies textbooks. Identifies four elements of considerateness: (1) readability level; (2) placement of relevant pictures or illustrations; (3) use of subtitles; and (4) use of words and phrases to connect ideas within and between sentences. (CFR)

Noting that issues surrounding grammar instruction are a source of controversy within the English language arts curriculum, this concept paper examines the usefulness of formal instruction in naming parts of speech, diagramming sentences, naming types of phrases and clauses, and naming sentence types. Following an introduction that defines…

A study of the information gained by students in the process of taking a cloze test in English as a second language was conducted with 34 full-time undergraduate foreign students at a state university. The subjects came from a variety of native language backgrounds. A 35-item cloze test was developed in which every eighth word was deleted,…

A university writing faculty conducted a study of the concepts of unity in expository prose and of sentence structure as understood by Arabic, Malay, and Spanish speakers to discover why some students grasp some concepts more readily than others. Interviews, surveys, and analysis of written compositions revealed that the reason lies in ways these…

Part of a 20-year Yugoslav Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, this study is intended to make students, teachers, textbook writers, and scholars aware of elements in the system of English modals that might cause difficulties to the native Serbocroatian-speaking learner of English. An eclectic method of contrastive analysis consisting of…

Summarizes five studies related to computerized language education: (1) speech synthesizers and children's writing abilities; (2) comparison of Writing to Read program and traditional teaching; (3) evaluation of Writing to Read program; (4) deaf adolescents and sentence construction; and (5) student attitudes toward writing with computers vs.…

A study examined the acquisition of negation in English as a Second Language in a 4-year-old Salvadoran girl, a native speaker of Spanish. Specifically, the study looked for evidence of language transfer in bilingual acquisition and the direction of that transfer (Spanish to English, English to Spanish). Over 5 months, spontaneous speech (55…