Grammatical Difficulties Research Articles

Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment

ABSTRACTThe spontaneous speech of both English-speaking (E) and Italian-speaking (I) children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined to determine (a) whether phonological factors influence the grammatical morpheme use of ISLI children, as has been found for ESLI children, and (b) whether ESLI and ISLI children show similar syntactic abilities at the same level of mean utterance length as measured in words. The results indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced the ISLI children's tendency to use articles – the only Italian grammatical morphemes in which word-final consonants are required. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the ESLI and ISLI children. However, both groups of children seemed to have a problem using morphemes that constituted unstressed elements in a sentence even though the grammatical and semantic function of these elements varied across the two languages. The findings suggest that a speech production or perception component may be playing a greater role than previously believed in contributing to SLI children's well-documented expressive grammatical difficulties, though the specific effects of this factor will vary as a function of the surface characteristics of the language being acquired.

An Act of Theft: Teaching Grammar

Writing has come to the public's attention: people in schools are talking about it in earnest; NEH is funding grants on it. Crisis or not, the publicity calls us to reexamine our current practices. One aspect of teaching writing that bears reconsideration is the teaching of grammar. On the one hand, from Mina Shaughnessy's work1 and our own classroom experience it is clear that grammar is often highly problematic for students and teachers. On ithe other hand, investigators have concluded that the direct teaching of grammar has limited usefulness in relation to teaching-learning writing.2 This conclusion doesn't seem entirely logical, since familiarity with constituents usually aids work on a whole project. The conclusion may reflect on methods of teaching grammar, rather than on any inherent lack of relationship between grammatical facility and writing proficiency. In this paper I suggest several curative and preventative ways to deal with students' grammatical difficulties. The object of dealing with grammar is to enable students to acquire grammatical facility: that is, an ease of usage and the flexibility to choose from various grammatical options. The methods I suggestgrammatical problem solving, grammatical worksheets, and grammatical poetry (or linguistic yoga)-are grounded in the following propositions: (1) Grammatical facility is no guarantee that a student will be able to solve complex academic-cognitive tasks, but it will cut down on the noise and the spiraling anxiety which accompanies the writing through of such tasks when this facility is absent. (2) For students to acquire grammatical facility they must be active learners. Conversely, if our pedagogical interventions are to be effective, they must turn problems over to students. (3) As a corollary, it is not enough to make students conscious of problems with various and sundry markings on their papers. Indeed such markings tend to make students negatively self-conscious. (4) By and large, those grammatical constructs with which we choose to have students work need to be derived from the context of students' written

Adapting Reading Materials for Individualized Instruction

ABSTRACT The makeshift adaptation of materials for individualized instruction to which teachers are often forced is unsatisfactory in intermediate‐level reading. Students reading on their own often have problems because they do not know which aspects they should apply of what they already know. In the classroom, the teacher can ask guiding questions; reading material for individualized use needs to be adapted to provide the student with a similar set of guiding questions. These questions must be directed at grammatical difficulties and not simply at vocabulary. To achieve the goal of having the student read without assistance, there must be a process of gradually withdrawing assistance as he progresses. Specific types of questions and possible formats are presented. These suggestions, applied to a workbook accompanying a short novel, were shown in a comparative study to be more effective in increasing reading skills than the reading of the novel without such aid.

Grammatical Difficulties of Hungarian Students in Learning English

Grammatical Difficulties of Hungarian Students in Learning English

A Differentiated Reading Program for French

ONE of the most frequent and difficult problems in foreign-language teaching is the sudden loss of interest apparent in many pupils after the first few weeks of the initial term. The novelty of the foreign words wears off at about the time the grammatical difficulties begin, and the combination is too much for a large number of pupils. Experienced teachers acquire over a period of years numerous devices for stimulating new interest and simplifying these early problems, but few instructors are consistently successful in wholly eliminating either this initial slump or the later ones which threaten at intervals during the first two years. One device which many teachers admit will bring results but which they feel to be too difficult to organize is the differentiation of reading materials according to the interest range of the pupils at all levels. Such a reading program entails extra work and does not lend itself to a neatly organized schedule, but it creates and holds the interest of the pupils and challenges the teacher to find and to adapt new materials. A differentiated reading program may be carried out in a class of any size without special sectioning or the expenditure of additional time. It is true that one group--pupils interested in music and especially those who wish to sing-would profit immensely from more emphasis on pronunciation than the ordinary class can receive. If the teacher finds it possible during part of the period once or twice a week to give that group special instruction in oral work while the other pupils are busy on their individual or group reading projects, so much the better. The main interest of these pupils can be served, however, in their French work whether such special training is possible or not, just as the dominant interests of other groups can deter-