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Research
Related to the Hunter Writing System: Sentence
Sense
There is a research
study that stands head and shoulders above other studies in the
area of the contrast in benefits between instruction in
grammar--in this study, transformational grammar--and no formal
instruction in grammar. It is the Bateman and Zidonis study
[Donald R. Bateman and Frank J. Zidonis, The Effect of a Study
of Transformational Grammar on the Writing of Ninth and
Tenth Graders, 1966, ERIC ED 018 424].
What makes this
study so important is the degree of control that the researchers
maintained over the experimental conditions. Both teachers
and students were randomly assigned to classes; the instruction
lasted for two whole years (the students were in their 9th and
10th grades); there were 21 students in the experimental class and
20 in the control class; and the writing samples contrasted
(between those taught grammar and those taught no formal grammar)
consisted of the first six and last six compositions
by each student. The
writing of the experimental (grammar) group was superior to that
of the control (no-formal-grammar) group in two important
ways. First, the quality--the "well-formedness"--of
the sentences of the experimental group was so much better than
that of the control group that the difference was significant at
the .01 level of confidence; there was only 1 chance in 100 that
this difference in improvement was not due to the experimental
treatment. There were strict criteria for determining
whether a sentence was well formed or not. (Both of the examples
of "malformed" sentences supplied in the report were overly
complex run-together sentences.) Second,
and of great importance, is the fact that while 91% of the complex
sentences of the experimental group were well formed, only 52% of
the complex sentences of the control group were well formed.
Though the researchers, by oversight, failed to report on the
statistical significance of this difference, it is obvious that it
must be at the .01 level of confidence or better. Unfortunately,
this study has been largely ignored in the great debate over
the importance of teaching grammar as a separate subject in
classrooms. (See the section on this in the article "A
New Grammar That Has Clearly Improved Writing.") It
is of interest that the average I.Q. of the experimental class was
118.2. (The average I.Q. of the control class--that is, for
all but two of them for whom there were no records--was
115.) This is of interest because the difficulty of teaching
and learning transformational grammar has prevented this approach
to teaching grammar from gaining acceptance by teachers.
In contrast, Hunter's Sentence Sense writing system is a far easier sort
of grammar to learn and appears to have comparable power. [See
an article that discusses this study from a different vantage
point.]
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