The purpose of this study was to help second grade children expand and elaborate their sentences by using sentence expansion techniques which would provide exposure to word form classes and increase awareness and understanding of syntactic units. Nineteen children in a second grade class for the gifted were asked to write a one-page composition at…

If in reading a sentence a reader finds something unfamiliar in lexical meaning or grammatical structures, the meaning of the written material may be ambiguous to him. Sometimes the context will help to clarify the meaning of an unfamiliar element, but often it won't. Understanding what is read involves not only the process of reasoning, but also…

This document reports on three years of clinical research involving the development of effective clinical intervention procedures for children with slow language development. The assessment and treatment approaches discussed in the report are based upon the developmental model of grammar described in Developmental Sentence Analysis (DSA), a…

A contrastive analysis of Spanish word order is presented, first discussed in non-sentence constructions, and then in sentences and sentence-like constructions. A more productive methodology can be obtained in teaching word order through the balanced use of deductive and inductive methods. (NCR)

The "A comme..." section presents four articles: Suggested exercises for teaching the use of coordinating conjunctions; a technique for teaching letter-writing, based on an absence-excuse letter; the use of classified ads; and a suggested approach for the analysis of a contemporary novel. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Shows that grammar teaching fails not merely because of faulty teaching methods or imperfect knowledge of English grammar; it fails because of the inherent nature of language and the nature of the students to whom grammar is taught. Argues that it should not be taught until the last years of high school. (EL)

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)

Presents a three-stage process for teaching the logical relationships that exist in paragraphs to aid high school students in differentiating main ideas from subordinate statements. (MKM)

Provides a brief review of sentence combining development and research, and suggests some future directions for the technique. (RL)

Emphasizes that traditional textbook explanations of the preterite and imperfect tend to focus on their aspectual differences. The article argues that a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of these two tenses in narration must go beyond aspect to include their respective temporal and discourse properties. (30 references) (Author/CK)

Argues that, from a transformational-generative perspective, errors in writing mechanics (such as run-on sentences, comma splices, and errors in subject-verb agreement) persist because writing instructors do not exploit students' language ability. Describes how transformational grammar is useful in correcting errors in sentence mechanics. (MM)

Presents tips for teaching English-as-a-Second-Language students. Suggestions, complete with information on materials required, include preparing dialogs, poems on feelings, and sentences that grow. (LB)

Since many studies indicate that young readers have difficulty comprehending many commonly occurring forms of anaphora, an instructional experiment was conducted in which a variety of anaphoric forms was taught, the intervention period was of sufficient duration, and external validity was enhanced so that results would be generalizable to the…