Based on what Geoff Layton says below, I'd be very interested to know how explicit the writers' metalinguistic knowledge is? There are many types of dependent clause, for example.

Siobhan Casson


This is the basis of an approach that I call "sentence stuffing" - adding information to a basic sentence to create meaning. As soon as I took this approach, every student became an instant expert in dependent clauses. Not one student failed to create a unique dependent clause to tell why the baby was crying. This same approach - to create meaning rather than to reconstruct meaning (sentence combining) or to ignore meaning (grammar disconnected from writing) - can be used for every part of grammar imaginable.