A systematic review of literature on the teaching of grammar identified a particular technique as likely to improve writing skills. If teaching time is limited, the researchers suggested that using the time to teach techniques such as sentence combining would help children write better, rather than teaching formal grammar which they say there is little proof of it improving writing skill in young children.
A systematic review of literature on the teaching of grammar identified a particular technique as likely to improve writing skills. If teaching time is limited, the researchers suggested that using the time to teach techniques such as sentence combining would help children write better, rather than teaching formal grammar which they say there is little proof of it improving writing skill in young children.
Sentence combining covers a range of different activities designed to help writers create longer and more complex sentences. For example, children can be taught to combine two simple sentences using a connective (such as whilst, because, if, although etc). Children can also be taught to embed a number of adjectives and adverbs as well as words in parenthesis in order to make sentences more interesting. For example, “The bag felt heavy” could become, it is suggested, “The faded denim bag, which (according to Inspector Holmes) had been left lying on the platform all night in the rain, felt heavy to Joan when she picked it up by mistake on Thursday morning. “ Isn’t it interesting how the major premise of this sentence “The bag felt heavy” somehow disappears under the morass of detail. “
I think the teaching of creating very complex sentences is fraught with problems – it can lead to the verbosity of American spoken and written English, and create tedious prose if the teacher has little imagination and a lot of application.
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