The purpose of this study was to compare two different methods of teaching college-level English grammar and composition, the linguistic method and the traditional method, to freshman students at a large midwestern university. English students enrolled in the introductory English grammar and composition course served as subjects. The experimental group was taught by the linguistic approach, and the control group was taught by the traditional methods approach. During the course of the semester, the students of both groups were asked to compose seven themes covering selected subjects and subject areas. A standardized method of grading compositions was used to assign numerical values to each theme; the first theme and the last theme were considered to be pretest-posttest measures. An analysis of covariance was used to test the two hypotheses and to control the effects of the discrepancies reported among various biographical measures at the same time. The results indicated that those students who had been taught by the linguistic methods approach made significantly greater gains in grammar and composition than the control group. (Author/WR)