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Corner of
the Author of the Hunter Writing System: Sentence Sense
Text
It is my
conviction that the end effects of my writing system are to
make students fluent and accomplished writers--and
faster
and more competent readers. It
is also my conviction that learning English by means of this text's immersion-in-structure-based
strategies
assures the forging of a now-missing and
indispensable link in the education of children, youth, and adults.
[Read below and see my Rationale
and Philosophy
pages.] In
support of this, I will point out some important facts about
the program and add some quotations not referred to elsewhere.
The sections here are as
follows: uniqueness
of the grammar instruction, uniqueness
of the composition instruction, number
of chapters needed to get dramatic results, example
of a parent and five children benefiting simultaneously, reports
regarding help for reading, reports
regarding help for taking the SAT's, and reports
regarding getting help for (public) speaking.
Facts about the
Grammar Component That Make This Program Unmatched
1.
One of its goals
(and effects) is to make students owners
of at least ten of the ways sentences can begin--other
texts have overlooked this as an area of instruction. (When
other texts speak of the "patterns of the sentence,"
their sole concern is for the elements that can follow a verb.)
2.
Its primary method
of teaching ownership of
sentence structure is to have students actively experience
the roles and boundaries of the key sentence components;
they
rearrange sentence parts for this purpose.
3.
A foremost goal is so to immerse students in the structure of the
sentence that they become owners of its parts and controllers
of how correctly and tellingly they express themselves--unlike
programs that are so concerned with rules that they do not teach
the backdrop that helps the rules make sense and stick.
4.
Its
primary stress
is on the roles of word groups--as opposed to those of individual
words--as performers of
grammatical function.
5.
Its
strategies for finding verb units are failsafe.
6.
It teaches and
uses the verb as the key to
unlocking and mastering the sentence and its structure.
7.
Its exercise material
repeatedly offers insightful and/or uplifting content.
8.
Its primary strategy for introducing new
concepts is to list and illustrate the truths that
underlie and clarify these concepts.
9.
It has achieved a verifiable and
consistent trueness to the way our language really works.
10.
It starts with the
assumption of no prior
knowledge ... and builds from the known to the
unknown in an
incremental and cumulative way--so that even underachieving students
go from success to success.
11.
This grammar has met the approval of the linguist Robert L.
Allen, then head of the Language and Arts Department of Teachers
College, Columbia University. As chairperson of my doctoral
committee, he gave his approval to all of the key strategies that
I had originated. In addition, it was at his insistence that
my work also incorporates his own linguistic theory (known as
sector analysis)--but only at the sentence level--as its twin
foundation.
Almost
all of the above points are more fully developed in the Rationale
section. Also see the Excerpts
section.
[back
to section headings] [back
to Is This Grammar Unique?] [back
to success on the job}
Facts about
the Composition Component
That Make This Program Unique
1.
It requires an outline
(the prewriting here) for
every exercise ... and supplies an easy-to-imitate model outline for each new paragraph type.
2.
It offers an original and insightful strategy to help students
"invent" paragraph content.
3.
It supplies a thorough--and amply illustrated--list of strategies for
achieving coherence.
4.
Its models
are not only positive and insightful to read but often include study-skills tips
as well.
5.
Its
instructions are easy to understand and apply.
6.
Its effect is to form students who by habit write focused
and coherent paragraphs and essays. [back
to success on the job]
Go
to the Excerpts
section for examples of some of this.
[back
to section headings]
Additional
Reports from Users of the Text, Findings from Questionnaires, and
Citation of Facts
Causes Dramatic
Results No Matter How Many
Chapters Are Covered
After 5 chapters:
Two-thirds of a developmental/remedial college class passed the requirements
to qualify for Freshman English.
After 6 chapters:
A man who had been thought incapable of passing the writing
portion of the GED exam passed it on his first try.
After 10
chapters: A group of slightly learning disabled
7th graders improved their "overall writing competence"
59% (according to the criteria of the Test of Written Language-2).
After 12
chapters: A teacher reported that her (slightly
learning disabled 8th graders) were now writing with maturity and
sophistication.
After 17
chapters:
A home-schooled 10th grader entered a
college freshman writing course the very next (her junior) year
and surpassed all her classmates in her writing ability. [return
to Minimum Number of Chapters in FAQ] [return
to Best Grade Level in FAQ]
[back
to Can any chapters be skipped?]
[back
to section headings]
Has Been
Well Received--in Home Settings--by Parents Themselves and Students from
Second Grade Through Seniors
2nd Grade
through 11th and Adult:
One homeschooling mother
[Margaret Drye, NH]
taught the entire book to herself and to all her children at
once--one each in 2nd, 4th, 6th, 9th, and 11th grades. They
enjoyed the learning experience so much that they were sad that
the instruction was coming to an end. "It's been great;
it's so simple and logical," she reports.
[Note that my
recommendation to parents is that they wait until their children
reach 5th grade unless their children are exceptional.]
[back
to section headings]
Helps
Reading
College Level:
A student in the Animal Science program at State University of New
York reported that she used to
have to read material three times to understand it but that as a
result of the grammar instruction one reading is now sufficient.
Middle-School Level:
An English department chair [Julie Skebeck, Newport News, VA]
was
pleased with the instruction and surprised to find that the work
helped reading as well as writing.
College Level:
At the end of each semester, I would ask my students whether
different skills had been helped by the grammar instruction (and
by several of the other sorts of instruction). Their choices
were that a skill had been helped
"none," "some," "much," or
"very much." In the area of help for reading,
from 45% to 75% of my students responded that grammar had helped either
"much" or "very much" (this was In anonymous
questionnaires). The Freshman Composition students were at
the lower percentages; the developmental/remedial students, at the
higher. (By the way, in the area of writing, 80% of both
groups of students found that the grammar work had been of
"much" or "very much" help--consistently.)
[to
helps with speaking] [back
to success on the job]
[back
to section headings]
Helps
with the SATs
My
own daughter got a near-perfect
score of 740 (out of 800) on the verbal part of her SAT's,
and she attributes her success primarily to the help with
grammar that she had received from me (which, of course, was essentially
the same as the content of the Sentence Sense text).
The
home-schooling
mother who taught her five children and herself at the same time
went out of her way to report that her junior scored very well on
the SATs (the grammar part).
[back
to section headings]
Helps
with Speaking
A college student in
my Freshman Composition class remarked, after a vacation, that his
parents wondered what they were teaching him at the college because
he was speaking English so much better.
I discovered that
students that I had taught Freshman Composition (and, therefore,
my grammar system) to--when asked to speak extemporaneously in
my public speaking class--would speak unmistakably clearly.
In contrast, more than half the other students--when asked to
speak extemporaneously--spoke so unclearly that I struggled to
understand what they were saying (most had similarly already
taken Freshman Composition). [back
to success on the job] [back
to section headings]
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