Ed, I have not done the tree diagrams with my class; I do know that a teacher at our Central Campus has used both in her class and finds that it works well. She does not do as much with sentence production as I do. I worked on creating a course that works on improving writing as it teaches the syntax of English sentences. This is not, however, a composition course. I agree with Dick Veit that doing even a fairly thorough job of teaching grammar is pretty hard to combine with a composition course. Maybe if one has a semester instead of a quarter it is more possible. As I have indicated before on the list serv, students who have taken this class have reported back even years later that they were better readers after taking this class. But since Reed and Kellogg is not the only pedagogy in the class, I cannot claim that it is that that is helpful. It might be the sentence combining or a combination of the two--which is my pretty much untested theory. Edith Wollin -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eduard C. Hanganu Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 4:59 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: research on sentence diagramming? Edith: I have tried both Reed-Kellogg diagrams and tree diagrams in the English Composition classes I am teaching and I found out that the students find tree diagrams more intuitive and easier to understand than Reed-Kellogg diagrams. Have you had a chance to compare the two types of diagrams in classroom applications? As a curiosity, the students who had learned the tree diagrams with me were able to remember the tree diagramming a semester later during a grammar course taken with another instructor. As I don't believe that their retention was due to my extraordinary teaching skills, the only conclusion I can draw is that the students understood so well the tree diagram approach that they had no difficulty remembering it. Eduard On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Edith Wollin wrote... >Beth Rapp Brown's position on diagramming is certainly held by many >people, and I would certainly never use it as the only pedagogical >method for teaching grammar. However, I have found that the traditional >Reed and Kellogg diagrams (with some updating to fit more current >understandings of sentence syntax) help visual learners a great deal in >understanding the relationships amongst words in a sentence. I have >combined diagramming with sentence combining, writing one's own >sentences, using syntactic structures in context, etc. and have found it >very useful for student learning. > >Edith Wollin=20 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/