Text reordering, text rewording, text recording, and text researching offer students who must use prescriptive grammar books the opportunity to observe, analyze, manipulate, and enjoy language. (Author/RL)

Grammar should be taught for its own sake, not as a means to improving student writing because, in fact, it doesn't.

The purpose of this experimental study was to determine whether instruction in generative grammar would produce better student writing. As a secondary aspect of the study, evaluation of all students was made for growth in knowledge of grammar apart from writing or other practical applications, whether the students had been instructed in generative…

The teaching of grammar has been in sad decline since medieval times, when it included the whole skill of creating in language. Our textbook community has moved through a series of ineffective fashions, from those of Fries to post-Chomsky. All have presumed to replace prescriptive rules with realistic explanations. But all have fallen, like the…

A process-oriented freshman composition instructor who stresses invention, drafting, and revision can simultaneously integrate a form of grammatical instruction. Various methods and strategies, both from experience and research on grammar from the classical to the contemporary era, suggest such a creative integration. First, the teaching of…

Contains comments on articles by Patrick Hartwell, Robert Scholes, and Gordon Broswell. (EL)

The history of grammar instruction includes two approaches: the handbook approach, which is practiced today, and the textbook approach. The handbook approach focuses on rules for correct writing and is an error-based view, while the textbook approach would treat grammar holistically and interpretively and would systematically explain new concepts…

Traditional, formal grammar instruction has, at best, a negligible affect on writing improvement, but transformational-generative grammar instruction can improve syntactic versatility in writing. (AN)

A conscious understanding of the grammar system can have value for student writers. Unfortunately, the positive value of teaching grammar in an instrumental, or functional, way has been overshadowed by the negative and irrelevant data concerning "formal grammar." However, if teachers were to use "rhetorical grammar" and emphasize the importance of…

The author makes a case for teaching traditional prescriptive grammar for 10 weeks at the beginning of the tenth grade. (JM)

A project to investigate the effects on the language development of secondary school pupils of a study of transformational grammar as represented in the Oregon English Curriculum involved 250 students in a large, coeducational high school near Auckland, New Zealand. The students were divided into three matched groups who studied different English…

The authors review studies which suggest that sentence combining exercises might improve composition in ways that traditional grammar has long been alleged to do, particularly in the areas of sentence structure, usage, ideas, and style. Implications are drawn for grammar instruction in the middle school. (Author/SJL)

To compare the results of three different methods of grammar instruction in remedial freshman English, three groups of 16 students each--matched on SCAT total raw score, age, and sex--were used as subjects. The approaches used were (1) formal instruction based on a traditional grammar textbook--control group; (2) discussion of the class' writing…