This study attempted (1) to determine the ability of children to translate four basic sentence patterns varied according to three levels of structural complexity (single words, clauses, and phrases filling sentence pattern slots), and (2) to determine whether this knowledge is related to their reading comprehension. A test of grammatical structure…

Mastering sentence-construction skills is essential to learning to write. Limited sentence-construction skills may hinder a writer's ability to translate ideas into text. It may also inhibit or interfere with other composing processes, as developing writers must devote considerable cognitive effort to sentence construction. The authors examined…

Developed by the Oregon Elementary English Project, the eighteen lessons in this unit aim to interest third and fourth grade students in thinking about how sentences are made, to introduce some grammatical concepts, and to build on the instinctive knowledge students already have about the English language. The first three lessons are devoted to…

In this study, fourth-grade materials based on a linguistic approach to grammar known as sector analysis were devised, field-tested, and evaluated. Two socioeconomically similar fourth grades--experimental and control groups--were pre- and post-tested to find possible changes in the complexity of their sentence structure after the experimental…

A study investigated whether children and adolescents use commas and the principle of Late Closure to guide sentence parsing decisions as adults do in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences. The study consisted of three experiments, conducted similarly but with different subject groups: 24 university students; 24 fourth-graders; and 19…

The procedures used to develop a list of concepts taught in fourth-grade language arts are described. Thirty concepts from the list were randomly sampled and then analyzed. Analysis consisted of listing examples and non-examples, relevant and irrelevant attributes, subordinates and supraordinates, and a definition and principle for each concept.…

This study compared a grammar program using a linguistic approach with one using a traditional approach to determine how each affects children's ability (1) to construct sentences which have variety in structure, and (2) to comprehend silent reading. Five experimental and five control classes of fourth-grade children were randomly selected from…

Supplementary to "NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress," this report describes two aspects of writing for which change has been measured since 1984: writing fluency as determined by holistic scoring; and mastery of the conventions of written English as determined by mechanics scoring. The introduction discusses the layout and means of…