The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

Meta communication plays a key role in foreign language learning and teaching. Broadly speaking, meta communication is communication about communication. Meta communication is something that goes beyond communication and all language learners and teachers should be familiar with its existence. It should be stressed that meta communication which…

In this study, errors in the English writing of students in the College of World Englishes at Chukyo University, Japan are examined to determine if there is a level of acceptance among teachers. If there is, are these errors becoming part of an accepted, standardized Japanese English Results show there is little acceptance of third person…

That "will" and "shall" are modal, not temporal, verbs is shown by their syntactic similarity to the modals and by the fact that they follow the same transformational rules as the modals. This example demonstrates the usefulness of transformational grammar in explaining grammatical relationships to students. (Text is in…

The use of "some" and "any" does not depend solely on syntactic factors (sentence type), as hitherto taught, but also on the speaker's expectation and other pragmatic elements and on semantic factors not limited to those of quantification. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Certain aspects of transformational grammar can be effectively applied to the ESL classroom. The use of the "there" insertion rule in explaining declarative sentence patterns is described as an example. (AG)

"Advanced student" is defined here as the kind of student who can converse with native speakers and read simplified or simple English prose at reasonable rates with good comprehension. Such a student, however, is still not ready for university-level reading. The major problem for the teacher is not teaching English words but English structures.…

This paper deals with deep and surface structure differences and their implication for language teachers. Examples of similar surface structures and dissimilar underlying structures often presented to students of English for pattern drill are pointed out (e.g., the "it" in "It's easy to speak English,""It's difficult for us," and "It's hot…

The relevance, the application, and the importance of linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language is discussed. The author's assumption is that linguistics is "irrelevant to the aims, and inapplicable to the tasks of such teaching," and agrees with linguists such as Rosenbaum that the goal of linguistic science is "to determine…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the concept and method of deriving various English "true possessives" by nominalizing sentences of the form "X has Y." First considered is the motivation for deriving genetives from underlying sentences rather than for treating only the surface form of such genitives: the use of auxiliary…

Students of English as a second language, whose errors in writing result partly from lack of control over English transform patterns, should be taught to combine ideas through a transform process. (Author)