Scott - Not sure what the "research" says.  I do the same thing you do 
but with 6th graders.  It helps tremendously when they read newspapers, 
reading comp sections of standardized tests, and many textbooks.  We 
start with identifying prepositional phrases and putting parens around 
them, that makes things so much clearer.

Marcia Alessi
On Oct 3, 2005, at 12:27 PM, Scott Woods wrote:

> Much of the discussion of the usefulness of teaching grammar seems to 
> center on its level of usefulness in improving student writing.  What 
> has been done to look at its usefulness for improving reading skill?  
> Does the ability to identify subject and finite verb, objects, 
> complements, adverbs and adjectives, and so forth help one understand 
> difficult sentences?  It seems that it would, from my classroom 
> experience.  For instance, the following sentence was largely 
> incomprehensible to most of my high school sophomores before they 
> identified its parts.  Most of them thought it was about time, or a 
> year, or the cold, or birds.  Then we went through the sentence part 
> by part and most of them could say what it was about.  They didn't 
> analyze the sentence on their own, spontaneously, but because we had 
> looked at similar sentences, we were able to discuss this one.
>  
> That time of year thou mayst in me behold/ When yellow leaves, or 
> none, or few, do hang/
> Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ Bare ruined choirs, 
> where late the sweet birds sang.
>  
>  
> Scott W. Woods
>
>  
>
>
>  
>
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Marcia Alessi
Language Arts & Social Studies
Sixth Grade
St. Paul the Apostle School
Los Angeles, California

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