Describes two studies designed to determine how community college students in remedial freshman English sections defined a written "sentence." Concludes that subjects associated a complete written sentence with a verb-noun sequence of a certain requisite length and with a word string containing a prepositional phrase. (ET)

Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

Examines and tests the hypothesis that left-branching (LB) sentences are judged to be more formal than right-branching (RB), and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB. Two studies involving university students are described in which LB, RB, and CB sentence structure formality were judged. (17 references) (GLR)

Investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. Examines a function of connectives: that of signaling coherence relations between two clauses. In three studies, coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants' continuations to the fragments were identified.…

This document is a study guide for the Technical Writing I course at Oklahoma State University-Okmulgee. It focuses on the writing process and offers strategies for improving writing. The guide also covers writing for specific audiences and purposes. Sections include: (1) the course syllabus; (2) grading criteria; (3) basic computer skills; (4)…

The task of teaching grammar in language courses is difficult because many American students lack a thorough grounding in the structure of their own language that could serve as a model framework for learning the grammar of another. It is helpful therefore for language teachers to stress parallel structures in the two languages, and to introduce…

The acquisition of English sentential complementation by adult native speakers of Finnish was investigated. Forty-three Finnish university students were administered a written test consisting of production tasks, subcategorization and syntactic categories, and comprehension items. Cross sectional data were analyzed to determine whether an…

Writing research has long sought to identify the internal features of written discourse that help to explain qualitative differences among student texts. Reflecting the theories of the Prague School linguists, this study used a topical structure analysis to distinguish between the sentences and T-units of 48 college freshman essays evaluated as…

A comparison of measures of the attained writing proficiency of 45 college-level students of English as a second language is reported. Students were tested by two indirect measures, the Test of the Ability to Subordinate (TAS) and the Revision and Editing Test (RET), and their compositions were evaluated by a direct measure, holistic evaluation.…

The reversal of subject and predicate terms in quantified, categorical expressions was studied as an operation that is potentially important in issues of representation and comprehension of quantified relations. In two experiments students were asked to evaluate the relation between two quantified expressions. The salience of reversal in the…

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

A study examined two questions: Do students include more information or present it more concisely and explicitly when speaking or writing? and, Does language show different thematic relationships (through syntax or diction) depending upon the mode? Twenty-four community college students viewed one of two brief films and responded orally or in…

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

Two studies were conducted to test Francis Christensen's theory of generative rhetoric, which maintains that students should be taught the types of sentences that they infrequently use, especially ones with nonrestrictive phrasal modifiers (participial phrases and appositives) as a way to approach invention. The first study examined the principles…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…