Suggests that work with the cumulative sentence can have an immediate and profound impact on student writing in the areas of grammar, organization, and specificity. Finds the use of the cumulative sentence helpful as a sentence-combining technique and for several other aspects of composition and grammar. (MS)

This paper addresses the question of how grammar checkers may help or hinder students by analyzing the performance of the Microsoft Word 97's Grammar Checker at flagging and explaining errors frequently made by college students. Thousands of sentences were fed into the program. Results indicate that it caught some of the errors reliably (e.g.…

Discusses using structure drills in the foreign language classroom including use of same grammatical structure with slight variation, notional/functional drills, and situational dialogs. Suggests necessity of looking more closely at techniques in order to better understand teaching operation. (Author/BK)

Describes three experiments that investigated the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence. Concludes that context can affect within-sentence processes in comprehension. Test materials used in the experiments are appended. (FL)

Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

Notes the problems associated with integrating grammar study in writing instruction. Provides strategies for such integration, including a syllabus for teaching the verb phrase. (RL)

Draws on concept learning research to address the problem of grammatical explanations that may be perfectly clear to the teacher or textbook writer but that leave students groping for help. Describes problems that students have in learning grammatical concepts, and provides strategies to overcome those problems. (RS)

Two experiments with 64 college students are reported that examined the time course of retrieval in a sentence matching procedure. Results demonstrate that modifications are required for models that provide only a unitary value for the amount of match between a test probe and information in memory. (TJH)

Examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s (the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining) and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. Concludes that this erasure of sentence…

Noting that grammar is alive, changing, and controversial, this book offers a combination of guidelines and creative language use for people who have already been exposed to the rules of grammar to help them start building their own style of speaking and writing. The first part of the book "Recalling the Parts of Speech," provides a…

The punctuation system presented in this paper has explanatory power insofar as it explains how good writers punctuate. The paper notes that good writers have learned, through reading, the differences among a hierarchy of marks and acquired a sense of independent clauses that allows them to use the hierarchy, along with a reader-sensitive notion…

Prepositions are usually presented as prepositions of time or place, and prepositions associated with certain verbs and adjectives. However, this type of presentation overlooks the bases for preposition usage and in turn fails to convey those bases to learners. An alternative approach to the analysis of prepositions from a notional perspective is…

This exercise is intended to teach the sense of sentences and their place in the larger fabric of paragraphs as they are woven into organized papers. Based on the five-paragraph theme (introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion), the exercise divides "What I Haved Lived For," the prologue to "The Autobiography of Bertrand…

A study is presented that examines the null-subject parameter (NSP) and that seeks to attain the following objectives: (1) to assess the validity of the implicational hierarchy for the NSP, especially as proposed by Liceras (1989); and (2) to determine if there is any evidence to support the theory of the Weaker Logical Problem of Acquisition…

The two essays in this booklet reflect the spirit and ideas of Francis Christensen, specifically his exhortations to composition teachers, illustrated by his own practice, to approach the teaching of writing inductively, to look always to the writing of professionals for models, and to behave as scholars. The first essay, on sentence modelling,…