Craig:

"For" is redundant in the debated example. It is not needed. The 
propositional meaning of the sentence is still preserved without it. 
Because grammaticality includes economy of expression, a statement 
that defines "He worked for as long as he could" as "perfectly 
grammatical" does not reflect grammatical reality.  

Your example, "He painted the lines [for] as long as he could," is 
an ambiguous syntactic structure and I would recommend to my student 
to revise it.

Eduard 



On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Craig Hancock wrote...

>Eduard,
>   When you say your native speaker students generate 70% 
ungrammatical
>sentences, you are probably using the term in a rather unique way.
>   "He worked for as long as he could" strikes me as perfectly
>grammatical, as something I would easily say and easily understand. 
We
>would need a corpus to include it, but we would need a corpus to
>classify it as ungrammatical as well. >
>   I gave one example where "for" helps clarify, and I'll try 
another.=20
>"He painted the lines [for] as long as he could."  Without 
the "for",
>it's a statement about the length of the lines.  With the "for", 
it's a
>statement about how long he would work. The "for" makes the notion 
of
>duration clear.
>If it showed up in my students' writing, I would never think of it 
as
>ungrammatical.
>
>Craig

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