Translation of a paper presented at the Northeast Confernece on the Teaching of Foreign Languages held in April 1966 in New York, New York. (DS)

Modern transformational grammars can be effective tools for writing, for they offer hypotheses and generalizations about English sentences which can be used in an infinite number of linguistic contexts. One writing skill which transformational grammars can help students achieve is the ability to choose between synonymous expressions. Some…

A method of teaching question formation in the Chinese language by use of transformational grammar is described. (RM)

Basic to composition skill is control of sentence structure and accuracy in mechanics. Although it is often said that a student should not write what he has not first heard and practiced orally, it might equally well be said that he should not be expected to write grammatical patterns that he has not read, inasmuch as there is a difference in the…

Second in a series of articles surveying methods of teaching classical languages in British universities. Explores linguistic theory, relationship between personal expression and pure grammar, and the generative approach to grammar. (DS)

Attempts to apply the techniques and ideas of transformational grammar to the teaching of translation. A three-step procedure in which in the original text is reduced to based and embedded sentences, translated and reconstituted in the target language is outlined. Stylistic aspects of translation are also discussed. (FWB)

In acknowledging the debt of language teaching to recent developments in linguistics, the author opposes the transformational grammarian's view that habit-forming drills and the creative use of language are diametrically opposed. (FWB)

The author questions the usefulness of the concepts of transformational generative grammar, especially as represented in Jacobs and Rosenbaum's "English Transformational Grammar, for the teacher of English as a Second Language. Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, Chicago, March 1969. (FWB)

The attempt to teach deep structure recovery skills to poor readers was unsuccessful, perhaps because of student attitudes. (JH)

Typically, teachers approach ambiguity in student writing by suggesting that students focus on diction, syntax, and writing format; however, the works of modernists (including T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Marx, and Pablo Picasso) suggest the importance of conceptions of semantic clarity. Transformational models for syntactic elements in…

In viewing the approach to English and other grammars in the light of linguistic universals, the author feels that the principal justification for deep structure analysis of English is that "deep structure analyses of all the languages of our multilingual world in combination can serve as a genuinely scientific basis of a defensible universal…

Noam Chomsky's numerous criticisms of formerly well-accepted beliefs about the nature of language learning (e.g. in his review of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior") have led to a diversity of views regarding the potential application of transformational theory to the teaching of English as a second language/dialect. It seems clear, moreover, that his…