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Last week I posted an invitation to ATEG on the NCTE Middle school listserv and received this interesting reply, which Mr. Smith has given me permission to forward. I think the relation of basic sentence-pattern instruction to the support for reading comprehension is a vital area that we often overlook in thinking about grammar in relation to writing.

Many years ago I devised an experiment for my master's degree essay. At the time I was teaching two middle school English/reading classes. The classes each met for a double period. One period was to be devoted to reading, the other to English. I found the students able to read the reading instructional material (SRA Kit materials, Reader's Digest Reading Skill Builders, etc.) provided by the school. They could not read and succeed at using the English textbook. I wrote my own based on what I was learning in graduate school at Wayne State University in Detroit where I studied under such linguists as Dr. Donald J. Lloyd and Dr. Samuel Stone. I wrote my lessons in programmed learning format, to teach students to write with greater sentence variety, or so I hoped. I taught the six basic statement sentence structures or patterns. What I found was that students who used my program gained more in their reading comprehension scores than students in the class which did not use the program. The difference was quite great. The bottom ability homeroom which used the program (bottom homeroom of seven in the seventh grade), for the top six or eight students of 35 in the class, improved enough to be as many years above grade level in reading as they had been behind at the start of the semester and project.

These many years later I still use the program. I have seen class gains in reading of two years in one semester, with individual students showing a range of zero to five years of improvement in paragraph comprehension as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test in reading for paragraph comprehension, form JM and K M. I now teach high school English. I have seniors in high school who, at worst, read at the third grade reading level. My program, home made though it is, designed for my own students, still gets results equal to those I saw when I first used it in 1964.

I am one of five teachers statewide in Michigan who have been selected to set the standards for the writing proficiency test for the state assessment known as the MEAP test, or Michigan Educational Assessment Program. My own students come from the inner city of Detroit, and my high school is the lowest achieving school in the state. Nevertheless, my own students frequently do quite well on the writing test.

My reading program was tried last school year by the Chandler Park Charter School in inner city Detroit. Their students did remarkably well. Something like 160 of 190 students passed the reading and writing MEAP test. Of the four charter schools in the same management group, the total students who passed the MEAP test was about 192 students, of which about 160 came from the one school that used my program.