In this meta-analysis, we examined whether children identified with reading difficulties (RD) evidence writing difficulties. We included studies comparing children with RD with (a) typically developing peers matched on age (k = 87 studies) and (b) typically developing younger peers with similar reading capabilities (k = 24 studies). Children…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Good sentence construction, the act of writing multiple words into sentence types that make semantic and syntactic sense, is needed for clear and meaningful written expression. The present study investigated the effects of a multi-component writing intervention, sentence instruction and frequency building to a performance criterion, on the simple…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

This article explores aspects of early language and literacy that may predict later literacy development. It explores a range of assessment procedures used for oral language, vocabulary, sentence structure and phonology and early reading and writing. The article then describes a small-scale study which highlights the disconnections between the…

A paper presented at annual convention of National Council of Teachers of English (60th, Atlanta, November 27, 1970.) (Editor)

Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

This preliminary investigation grew out of the Project English study of written composition at the University of Georgia from 1963 through 1968. Toward the end of that project, attention was given to possible relationships between the quality of written composition and certain syntactic measures in student writing produced in schools using the…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

This article reports on the results of two international systematic research reviews which focus on different aspects of teaching grammar to improve the quality and accuracy of 5-16-year-olds' writing in English. The results show that there is little evidence to indicate that the teaching of formal grammar is effective; and that teaching…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…