I can only tell you what students tell me and my fellow grammar teachers of the course we offer at North Seattle Community College. It teaches syntax, does Reed-Kellogg diagramming, and sentence combining. The students (adult learners) consistently report that they read better after this course. However, we have done no research.
----------
From: Susan Witt[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Reply To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
Sent: Monday, April 19, 1999 8:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reading and grammar
Hi, all,
At 10:42 AM 4/19/99 -0400, you wrote:
>It is so good to see people talking about the ATEG conference. A week or so
>ago, I checked out the Web site,
>www.pct.edu/courses/evavra/ATEG/nextconf.htm
I noticed on this page that there is a section on reading and grammar. I
am interested in looking into the connections between sentence structure
and reading comprehension. Does anyone have any references about research
into this area? Specifically, I'm looking at older age ranges, after
initial decoding skills are learned. Especially middle school and high
school, but possibly as early as 4th grade. I know that people have
identified that longer, more complicated sentence structures are harder for
kids to understand. People have also noted that vocabulary problems get in
the way of comprehension. I am aware of a number of teaching strategies
and interventions to help kids cope with vocabulary problems, but do not
know if the same kinds of strategies and interventions have been developed
to help kids comprehend longer sentence structures. Is the only known
method of dealing with this is simply to wait for kids to mature so that
they develop these abilities on their own?
Does anyone know of any research on this issue?
Susan Mari Witt
240 ERML, MC-051
1201 W. Gregory
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217) 333-1965
Fax: (217) 333-4777