Translating ideas into acceptable sentence is an essential writing production process. Limited sentence construction skills can hinder young writers from expressing ideas as intended or creating sentences that are comprehensible to their audiences. This may also limit other writing production processes, as young writers must devote considerable…

The National Center for Leadership in Intensive Intervention (NCLII), a consortium funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), prepares special education leaders to become experts in research on intensive intervention for students with disabilities who have persistent and severe academic (e.g., reading and math) and behavioral…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether sentence combining with an explicit metalinguistic approach in comparison to typical science instruction was effective in improving written expression and understanding of comparison/contrast in science for eighth-grade students who struggle with literacy. Method: Eighty-four eighth-grade…

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has…

Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…

Teaching children to write successfully is an area of great concern to educators in the 21 st century. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, the writing skills of two-thirds of the students in elementary, middle, and high school are below grade level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). In 2003, the…

Constructing well-formed sentences is an important element of writing. However, many students struggle with this skill; in particular, writers with learning disability (LD). In this study sentence-combining practice with a peer-assistance component was used to improve the ability of four young students with LD to construct sentences and compose…

This report offers a number of specific teaching techniques that research suggests will help 4th- to 12th-grade students in this nation's schools. The report focuses on all students, not just those who display writing difficulties, although this latter group is deservedly the focus of much attention. The premise of this report is that all students…

Highly practical and accessible, this indispensable book provides clear-cut strategies for improving K-12 writing instruction. The contributors are leading authorities who demonstrate proven ways to teach different aspects of writing, with chapters on planning, revision, sentence construction, handwriting, spelling, and motivation. The use of the…