I have been lurking here for about a week and have found the discussion fascinating. Although I must admit, I sometimes feel as though I am in way over my head. I taught junior high language arts for many years. My best students were so so writers. I began teaching 24 sentence patterns to them - one per week. I also have numerous strategies that we used to reinforce the patterns throughout the week. We worked with clauses, participles, gerunds, infinitives. The kids really liked the program and their writing improved drastically. I am not a researcher so I kept no data. I only know that prior to the program 0% of my students exceeded on the state writing test and only 34% passed. By the end of the second year, 89% of the students were exceeding and 11% meeting. I continued the program and am now sharing it with other teachers who are reporting the same successes. Don't know if any of this means anything, but just felt I should share. Ph -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Susan Witt Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 3:34 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: When to teach what Ed Vavra notes: >>>>>Hunt, in "Early Blooming >and Late Blooming Syntactic Structures" rather convincingly argues that >participles are late blooming -- after subordinate clauses, which bloom >between seventh and ninth grades. <<<<< and asks, >>>have you read the research by Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban? <<< I would submit that if reading certain books that include 'late blooming' structures allows 6th and 7th graders to use them effectively, that these structures are in the students' capacity to learn successfully. Is it possible that Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban studied what does happen under certain sets of circumstances, but that under other circumstances, students are capable of learning more complex types of constructions? Ed noted also that certain constructions might be more common in narratives than in expository writing. I would think that if a construction appears in one type of writing, than this is evidence that it is in the student's area of proximal development, even if it does not appear in all forms of writing. If student attempts to use these constructions actually leads to more garbled writing, then I would agree that such teaching is harmful. If the children simply don't hold on to it, the teaching might be wasted time, but I could hardly call that harmful to their development. In reality, the problem may be that other teachers don't utilize and develop further abilities, rather than the child not being ready to learn them. This also happens in any other subject area where teaching is not reinforced by further teaching. At any rate, if greater access to more complex forms leads students to use them spontaneously, and if using them successfully leads the students to greater comprehension when they encounter them in reading, then yes, I would think we should celebrate this. I do think that some of the research on sentence combining did show that it resulted in writing that is less coherent, although the specific references escape me at the moment. I had the impression that these studies were done on elementary school kids, and used less structured, unguided forms of sentence combining. Sentence combining seems to mean very different things to different people. Also, during sixth and seventh grades, children are undergoing rather dramatic changes in their cognitive capacities, and these capacities need to be used to enhance their development. I'm not convinced that research done on elementary kids can necessarily be transferred to middle school kids, considering the developmental changes that take place during pre-adolescence. I would say, however, that teachers need to make a point of paying attention to the impact of these exercises on the overall writing, and make individualized judgments as to how much a particular child is ready to develop at any one time. I also think that the research on sentence combining needs to come up with some theories, and test out these theories, as to why it has the effects that it has. Is sentence combining the only way to achieve these effects? Understanding the underlying mechanisms could do more to enhance grammar and writing instruction than just saying that one particular method works. You could develop a wider repertoire of approaches, and use the one approach more effectively, if you understand what part of the activity is having the strongest impact. Personally, I find that sentence structure imitation exercises are more useful than sentence combining, and they have the added benefit of aiding assessment by demonstrating exactly where the student is in ability -- students who don't understand a particular structure or a particular level of complexity aren't able to imitate it successfully. They create very garbled sentences once you pass their level of competency, and show you exactly where you need to lighten up. However, I also think these exercises are most useful when combined with several types of activities that are mutually reinforcing. 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