Allow me to begin this chapter with a question -- a hundred years ago, an educated man wished to teach his child to read. What did he do? Obviously, the child had to be taught to decode the written symbols for words. But our gentleman would hardly have considered the ability to decode "man" and "fortitude" as fulfilling his desire. "Reading," in his mind, would have entailed the ability to pick up a book, decode the words, and understand much of the book’s meaning. How did our gentleman bridge this gap between decoding and comprehension? It is not uncommon, in the biographies of illustrious people of the preceding century, to read simply that they were "given the freedom of their father’s library." I would like to suggest that the child then bridged the gap on his own. We cannot, however, stop here. What did the child do to bridge the gap? The child read, of course, but he did not do so indiscriminately. He selected books according to their interest, obviously, but also for their comprehensibility -- too many strange words, or two complex a "style," would have resulted in the child’s closing the book and selecting something else. Rejected books might be returned to, perhaps years later, when the words and/or style had become accessible.

     Far too often we think of reading as a "can or can’t" activity, often drawing the line at the ability to "decode," but as I hope my example has suggested, the more important pedagogical question involves advancing the student along the continuum from the simple to the complex. Given a model of a person who reads and the freedom of a library, a child will naturally make this progression on his own. The problem that our children face is not just that television consumes too much of their time. It does so because it consumes too much of adults’ time: the children simply follow the adults. The real problem, therefore, is that children lack models of readers. Even most teachers are poor models. How often, throughout our years in school, did we hear a teacher say, "I’m reading this book and . . . . "  Children who do not see readers do not become readers.

     If teachers were better models, librarians would be more active, but most libraries still would not be overcrowded. Teachers have influence on children, but their parents and society in general have more. As educators, therefore, we need to consider how to help the student who lacks models, who reads relatively little, to navigate more easily from the simple text to the complex. The obvious response to this problem is the readability formula, but as I will note again below, such formulas are based primarily on vocabulary and virtually ignore style, or, in our context, syntax. At some point in the continuum from simple to complex, syntax is an unavoidable consideration. Trevor Gambell, for example, writing in English Journal, notes that students have problems with multiple choice questions that include subordinate clauses. Unfortunately, rather than suggesting that students be taught to read better, he concludes that "This problem also warns us that multiple choice questions need to be worded as simple sentences so that content is being tested rather than language" (43). Professor Gambell belongs to the Grandgrind school of education: facts (content) are what is important, and we need not teach students how to understand the interrelationships among them.

     His observation about students’ problems with reading actually suggests that an understanding of syntax (conscious or unconscious) will make students better readers. But what should that understanding be, and how can we help students to achieve it? This is an extremely difficult question to address, especially when we are talking about our native language. As we noted in Chapter Four, the syntactic "fluency" of each one of us has developed -- unconsciously -- through several stages. Since this development was unconscious, not only can we not explain it, we are normally not even aware of it. As we read a text, we are not aware that this or that syntactic construction would have caused problems for us as a child -- all syntactic constructions become equally transparent. The situation is different with a foreign language which we have learned primarily through books. I can note stylistic complexities in Russian texts, for example, that I would never notice in one written in English, since my understanding of Russian followed a textbook, rather than natural development. In more concrete terms, the mid-level student of Russian will be confused by gerundives in the text, either because she has not yet studied them or because they are still relatively new.

     Fortunately, psycholinguists have given us a relatively simple model of the reading process with which we can begin to understand the syntactic path that each of us may have followed in the movement from simple to complex reading. My own students (primarily college Freshmen) find this theory highly intriguing, and I suspect that high school, perhaps even junior high school students would find it equally so. The theory also gives them an additional explanation of why the study of grammar is important, and they may even be able to use it to improve both their reading and writing. Having presented the model of reading, I will suggest that we can trace the path of the increasingly difficult syntactic aspects of readability by examining students writing: the average seventh grader probably uses in his writing syntactic constructions which, as a fourth grader, he was learning to "decode" in reading. The remainder of the chapter is therefore devoted to a comparison of the writing of fourth graders, seventh graders, and the textbooks we give fourth graders to read. My research, as preliminary as it may be, raises several questions, the general thrust of which is that the texts we give our students may hinder rather than promote their growth in reading.  Students’ problems with reading are also discussed in Chapter Eleven, "Syntax, Thinking -- and Logic."
 
 

     Although psycholinguistics gets very complicated, in essence, the psycholinguists tell us that the human mind, when reading, looks for a subject/verb pattern, compresses ("chunks") it, and moves on to the next pattern. This process occurs in Short Term Memory, which, according to Miller, can juggle five to nine "bits" of information at a time. Individual words thus have to be "chunked," (grouped) and the chunking probably occurs as syntactic units. In the preceding sentence, for example, the mind reads "individual," but chunks it with "words" to form one "bit" as soon as the word "words" is read. As students study syntax, therefore, they are actually beginning to learn about how the human mind processes language. This understanding can not only reinforce their interest in grammar, it also can be used to help them understand why some things are more difficult to read than others and why such things as punctuation, which guides the reader’s mind in chunking, are important.
 

     I introduce a simple version of STM and language processing very early in the semester and refer to it frequently later. I don’t have time to tell students very much. I describe STM, as I have above, and add that once a main clause has been chunked, the information in it is shifted to Long Term Memory. Not much is known about Long Term Memory, but apparently the syntactic form of information is stripped before it gets there. Thus, if one recalls from STM what one has just heard, one can reproduce the exact syntax of the speaker. But if the same information is later recalled from LTM, the idea may be the same, but the words and syntactic structure will, in all likelihood, be different. Our primary interest, of course, is STM and the syntax of sentences. When discussing STM, I usually have a sentence from a recent paper on the board:

The sunny warmth of the October morning had failed to penetrate the conference room in the office of Richard Denham, psychologist.

     There are several implications and corollaries to this theory that I also discuss with students. For one, it means that, with one exception, the mind is going to take the first "free" noun, i.e., a noun that is not the object of a preposition, etc., as the main subject. The exception involves nouns that refer to time, since they are often used at the beginning of a sentence as adverbs:

Several weeks prior to this particular day, we had each completed an extensive questionnaire.

     A related corollary is that the mind will try to keep the STM load as low as possible, i.e., it will "chunk" whenever and wherever possible, thereby reducing the number of "bits" with which it has to deal. As a result, misplaced modifiers are liable to be incorrectly "chunked" by the reader:

Human beings are people that exist according to Webster’s Dictionary.

     A more important corollary of the theory is that once a word has been chunked, it is no longer available, as an individual word, for "rechunking." This corollary is especially important in helping students understand why some of their sentences are erroneous: it also explains why I suggest starting with prepositional phrases first. One student, for example, wrote:

The use of drugs and alcohol among members of the church are prohibited.

     An interesting way to prove this corollary to students involves subordinate clauses that have pronouns as subjects:

I slouched down a ramp into a dimmer room which was filled with cobwebs.

     Although this presentation of language processing is minimal, it indicates to students that there are psychological rules governing language and that they have, in effect, been studying these rules in their study of syntax. In discussing awkward or incorrect sentences, we frequently discuss how the sentence would be processed -- an understanding of language processing and syntax helps students see why various rules of punctuation are important.
 
 

     The experiments which led to the concept of STM were based on people’s ability to remember sequences of numbers: 6650494, 0864429, etc. Most people can easily recall a sequence of seven digits, seven "bits." Some people have trouble with more than five; others can recall nine. Psycholinguists, have, I am sure, refined the concept, and I would like to examine some of the directions that refining may have taken. In the first place, random sequences of numbers have no semantic value -- the person remembering them attaches no meaning to them and thus sees none as more important than any other, no "chunking," for example, is automatically involved in such recall. Does the necessity for chunking decrease the free capacity of STM? Or is the "chunking" capacity external to STM? Can the people in an STM experiment remember the name of the experimenter if they have just learned it? Can they remember the number of the room they are in if the room is new to them? Perhaps, in other words, people have several "short term memories," several processing areas, each for a different purpose? Another question of interest to language teachers is: does STM increase naturally with age, as we know that the length of main clauses does? Could, for example, the increase in clause length result in part from an increase in STM capacity? Can STM capacity be increased through practice? The questions are numerous, and I don’t pretend to have answers.

     Still, for our model of language processing, there are some interesting things that we might say. What memory, after all, is involved in language processing? In addition to the possibility that chunking itself decreases STM capacity, what is the effect of vocabulary on STM? Everyone has had the experience of stopping, in the middle of reading, to figure out what a word might mean. A pause of any duration results in the clearing of STM -- once we have satisfactorily deciphered the word (or given up on it), we either skip to the next sentence, or go back to reread. There is, in other words, a complex vocabulary factor that affects the syntactic processing capacity of STM. Unknown words, abstractions, etc. slow the process, if they do not cause it to fail altogether, particularly if we pause to decipher the meaning (or the sound) of the word, rather than take a guess at its meaning from context. The "phonetic" spellings inserted in many textbooks ("saLOOshun") may (I emphasize "may") help students pronounce a few words, but they probably also add to the students’ belief that "reading" is a process that involves the continual crashing of STM.

     Another memory involved in reading is the global, i.e., the reader’s constant awareness of the thesis and the current sentence’s relationship to it. Teachers frequently state that their students can write narratives very well, but that they do a terrible job with "expository" prose. Numerous college professors would agree, and add that students can’t write expository prose because they can’t read it. Vocabulary and global memory are not the topic of this book, but I have discussed them because reading (and writing) involves the interworking of syntax, vocabulary, and global memory. Difficulty in any one of the areas causes a drag on the others. Research has suggested that good writers attend to global questions, whereas the weaker writer concentrates on mechanics, word choice, and sentence structure.

     Students probably develop these skills separately, the global coming later than the other two. As a general example, the students who have a background of reading write better, not only better narratives, but also better expository essays. It would seem to be that their command of vocabulary and syntax, assimilated through many hours of reading, has made these two skills automatic. Thus, when then write, they are free to concentrate most or all the capacity of STM on global questions. Poorer writers, on the other hand, pay much more attention to mechanics, word choice, and sentence structure, all of which decrease STM capacity for global questions. Unfortunately, the wrong conclusions are usually drawn from the research. The line of logic usually taken is that since better writers concentrate on global matters, if we can make weaker writers focus on global matters, they will become better writers. Indeed, this has been a major argument against the teaching of grammar, the base of the argument that grammar instruction "wastes time." But if it is true that the better writer concentrates on global matters because questions of grammar and vocabulary have become automatic, then the logical approach is to help students understand grammar so that they can more quickly make grammatical decisions automatically.
 
 

     A reader of an early draft of this book worried that my intentions might be misunderstood, and, since what I’m about to say might easily lead to a whole new series of readability formulas, perhaps I should begin this discussion by stating that I am not in favor of them. My suggestion for replacing them will be given at the end of this chapter. What I wish to suggest here is that the sentences in many of the textbooks we give our students to read are unnatural and that therefore they give students an odd sense of what "reading" is and perhaps even kill their desire to read. By "reading," of course, I do not mean being able to look at a printed word and read it either to oneself or aloud. That skill is naturally important and a prerequisite to the ability to make all of the syntactic connections implied in the text such that one absorbs (or creates) a meaning from the words. Making the connections is what our previous discussion of the psycholinguistic model of reading was all about, and that model, simple as it is, suggests how complicated reading can be, especially if done with any speed. We cannot, therefore, expect fourth graders to "make the connections" in a passage from Henry James, but then how can we guesstimate what the reading materials of grade-school students should be like? I would suggest that our basic model can be taken from their own writing.

     Such has not been the case with readability formulas. Even a quick perusal of the material on readability formulas reveals that, although most designers of such formulas acknowledge that they should have two legs (vocabulary and syntax), the syntactic leg is a stump almost always reduced to "sentence length." It is no wonder that students, nourished on materials molded to such formulas, end up limping through their assigned readings and eventually find that they can go no further. There is not even any evidence, statistical or psychological, that shorter "sentences" are necessarily easier to read or that "sentence length" is a valid yardstick. There is, on the other hand, the psycholinguistic argument that the main clause is a valid yardstick -- at the end of a main clause, according to this argument, the mind completely clears STM of syntactic connections. The difference in yardsticks is simple, perhaps too simple for most of us to recognize its implications. Consider, for example, the following:

1.) It would be hotter than it ever is in Florida or Hawaii. There would also be days when it would be very cold. 

2.) It would be hotter than it ever is in Florida or Hawaii, and there would also be days when it would be very cold.

[My evidence is, I must admit, somewhat scanty. Very little research has been done in this area, and such research is extremely time-consuming. For the following discussion, my "statistical base" is the writing of ten fourth-graders, of 31 seventh-graders, and an analysis of 21 passages from a fourth-grade reading textbook, 24 passages from a fourth-grade science book, and 46 passages from professional writers. (For more details on these passages, see Chapter Twelve.) Statisticians will be quick to note that such a base is insufficient, particularly since I often do not qualify such statements as "textbooks use fewer compound sentences than either students or professional writers." My lack of qualifying statements should be attributed to my disinclination to repeat such phrases as "in my research," "in my opinion," "apparently," or "it seems that." I fully recognize the tentativeness of my conclusions, but my purpose is not to reach conclusions but to raise questions and to suggest directions for answering them. Most of the points I am about to raise agree with (or at least do not conflict with) the research of Hunt, O’Donnell, and Loban, and they coincide with the theory of natural syntactic development presented in Chapter Four.]

This chart indicates that the Science and English textbooks match our expectations fairly well: they come very close to matching the figure for seventh grade writing. Unfortunately, we cannot make a similar chart for "words per sentence": since seventh graders have a penchant for run-ons and comma splices, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine where their sentences end. We can, however, determine their compounded main clauses, simply by counting those clauses that begin with a coordinating conjunction that is not preceded by a final punctuation mark:
 

Of the two issues raised by this chart, the least important is the effect on sentence length. But the relatively low number of compounds in the two textbooks does have an effect, for if we combine these figures with those from the preceding chart to project average sentence length, we arrive at:
 

[The "projection" is based on the following logic. Since nine out of every hundred clauses written by a fourth grader is a compound, then eighteen out of every hundred will be involved in a compound sentence, a sentence that will average 15.70 words, i.e., twice the "norm." That will leave eighty-two 7.85 word "sentences," but there will be a total of only 91 sentences. Thus the total number of words is divided by 91, rather than by 100.]

     The more important issue raised by the chart of compound main clauses involves coordination and logic. Coordinating conjunctions indicate logical relationships: they show what goes with what. We might all agree that most fourth graders do not use such conjunctions very logically, but if my statistics are an accurate reflection of fourth grade textbooks, the textbooks are not much of a help to students. They cannot very well model the use of conjunctions if they use them so infrequently. This lack of frequency is further demonstrated in the following chart:
 

Here too, in other words, the textbooks fall behind the students and the professional writers. And the question goes beyond the mere numerical counts. Textbooks, especially for those students who do not read on their own, serve as a model of writing. In using few compound main clauses and few coordinating conjunctions as sentence openers, the textbooks may be suggesting to students that the way to write is to present isolated, unrelated sentences. But the textbooks should also be gradually increasing the syntactic reading fluency of students. For fourth graders, this probably means increasing their ability to comprehend parataxis (compounding). As we saw in Chapter Four, natural syntactic development probably goes through the stage of increased compounding -- the textbooks apparently try to go around it. This end-run, however, may ill prepare students, especially those dependent on textbooks for their main reading, for the later stages of syntactic development, i.e., hypotaxis (subordination).

     If we look at the hypotaxis, in particular the subordinate clauses, in our fourth grade textbooks, they too appear to lag behind what we find in seventh graders’ writing:
 

The textbooks clearly use more subordinate clauses than the fourth graders themselves do, but they do not present the fourth grader with the clausal complexity that the average seventh grader’s writing would. In itself, this is not necessarily bad, but I will suggest below how this comparative lack of clausal complexity, combined with an overabundance of reduced syntactic constructions (such as the gerundive), may derail the students’ natural development of syntactic fluency.

     Some readers may suspect that most of the students’ subordinate clauses in the preceding chart may be noun clauses used as direct objects after such verbs as "said" or "thought." The fourth grade students, however, use fewer such clauses than the textbooks do:
 

And if we subtract the direct object clauses from the total of subordinate clauses, the textbooks, in their use of all other clauses, come still closer to mirroring the fourth graders’ own writing rather than leading it:
 

In another, and perhaps more important aspect, the textbooks lag behind the fourth graders. As opposed to length and frequency counts, embedding levels are clearly a reflection of syntactic complexity. Throughout this book we have limited the concept of "embedding level" to the nesting of a subordinate clause within another clause -- a second level embedding is thus a subordinate clause within a subordinate clause, etc. As the following chart indicates, even professional writers rarely go to the fourth level or beyond:
 

If further research confirms these findings, it will mean that in this crucial aspect of syntactic structure, the writing of fourth graders is actually more advanced and more complex than that in the textbooks from which they should be learning. Their textbooks are, in effect, holding them back!

     At the risk of being repetitious, perhaps I should expand upon why embedding level is so crucial. Earlier we noted Trevor Gambell’s finding, that high school students have problems with multiple choice questions that include a subordinate clause. But if a subordinate clause (i.e., a first level embedding) gives students a problem, then how much more of a problem must they have with second, third, and fourth level embeddings? And we cannot, I would suggest, take Gambell’s way out of the difficulty, i.e., phrase all questions in simple sentences, for by doing so we will never prepare students to read "professional" writing. Rather, the solution, it seems to me, would be to go in the other direction -- to give students more heavily embedded sentences, not necessarily in tests, but certainly in their textbooks. Ideally, in other words, our textbooks should, if not match the seventh graders’ writing, at least fall somewhere between the fourth and seventh graders rather than lagging behind. The best way to help students decode complexly embedded sentences is to give them numerous such sentences to read.

     In addition to the comprehension of clauses, embedding level is apparently, as we noted in Chapter Four, the natural channel of syntactic development. As the preceding chart suggests, there seems to be a natural resistance to embeddings at level three and beyond. We might say that once a student has assimilated level two embeddings the thrust of further syntactic development changes in the direction of reductions such as the gerundive. But textbook prose, instead of leading students into deeper levels of embeddings and only then into reductions, seems to be ignorant of this natural development and therefore burdens the fourth grader with an overabundance of gerundives:
 

The textbooks examined used four times as many gerundives per main clause as did either the fourth graders or the seventh graders in their writing. The gerundives used by the fourth graders, moreover, can all be considered "formulas":

when I was tired
a cat named Dinkey
He goes all over the place asking for  money for his company

I have a mom named Cynthia. I have a father named Thomas. I have sister name Missy. I have a brother name Tommy.

     The inclusion of "words per gerundive" on the chart further illustrates how the textbooks put an undue strain on the syntactic capacities of fourth graders. The statistic is easily calculated, since it includes the gerundive itself plus any words that would have to be deleted (or would change in function) if the gerundive were deleted. Thus in "a cat named Dinkey," if "named" goes, either "Dinkey" does also, or it becomes an appositive. The figure for 4th grade writing may be too high because of the small sample: only two of the fourth graders gerundives were longer than two words, and they were "asking for money for his company" and "a pretty nice sized house." The latter probably should not even be counted among the gerundives (would anyone say or write "the house is (was) sized"?), and its formulaic origin is also suggested by the adjectival modifier "nice," rather than the adverbial "nicely." In the textbooks, little complaint can be made about the length of gerundive phrases in the science book, but the 3.5 average words for the English text is probably too close to the 4.1 words of professionals.

     Lest I be accused of making much ado about nothing, we need to consider the mental operations involved in the development of the gerundive. As I have suggested elsewhere, the construction probably has two sources -- formulas and reduction. Formulaic gerundives tend to consist of one or two words ("named Thomas"): the science text, for example, uses a number of them: "living things," "moving air," "passing clouds," "broken wire," "sprained ankle." Gerundives that result directly from reduction, on the other hand, tend to be longer since they bring with them the remnants of a clause. In the reading text we find such things as:

a person buried by an avalanche.
Eugenie spent hours looking at the many different fish.
all interesting things going on in our apartment building.
Keeping one hand on the wall, they slid their feet forwards, feeling with their toes and the balls of their feet.

     Whereas a subordinate clause entails the embedding of one nexal (subject/finite verb) pattern in another, the gerundive requires the decoupling of a nexus and then a reattachment as a modifier. The mental operations involved in the creation of an original gerundive (as opposed to a received formula) may not only be beyond the scope of the fourth grader (as well as of the average seventh grader), but they may also be directly opposed to the fourth graders’ psychological syntactic needs. Simply stated, fourth graders appear to be trying to keep their subjects and verbs attached and close together. Note, for example, that fourth graders do not use adjectival or adverbial clauses that separate a subject from its verb:
 

Psycholinguistically, in other words, fourth graders apparently have trouble with a subject and then another subject (for a different clause) before the verb that goes with the initial subject. If what I am suggesting is true, then the following gerundive, from the science text, must truly confuse them:

The fourth grader is going to try to read "made" as a finite verb. The sentence may not make much sense as a result, but many fourth graders are probably accustomed to the lack of sense. Their confusion simply confirms their impression that their job is to accept what they are told, not necessarily to understand it. The solution to problems like this one is to eliminate the reduction by reestablishing the clause:

If my theory is correct, this sentence will still give the average fourth grader difficulty, but it will be a difficulty which he can overcome. Having eventually assimilated such mid-branching clauses, the student will be ready to move on to understanding the mid-branching gerundive. I might note, by the way, that my example from the science text is not a fluke. The same text includes:

But a statement using information about weather conditions can be made.

As the air carrying your sounds hits the bottom of the can or box, it will vibrate.

     Mid-branching gerundives are not the only ones to cause problems by their location. If fourth graders try to keep verbs close to their subjects, they also need gerundives close to the noun modified. But the twenty-one passages from the English text include:

Feared by people and most animals, the crocodile has terrible jaws.

Keeping one hand on the wall, they slid their feet forwards, feeling with their toes and the balls of their feet.

The tracks of his wagon and buggy wheels had made a perfect half-circle drive curving into the grove of little sapling trees before the house.

The tracks of his wagon and buggy wheels had made a perfect half-circle drive.

     Related to the gerundives, but even more complex, are the noun absolutes. In their adverbial function, they were not used frequently enough to show up in the statistics for either of the textbooks or in the writing of the fourth or seventh graders. There may be a problem, however, with their use as objects of prepositions:
 

The fourth grade textbooks used this complex construction two or three times more often than do professional writers! Here, for example, is a passage from the English text (I have emphasized the absolutes):

Lara loved to look at the lamp, with its glass chimney so clean and sparkling, its yellow flame burning so steadily, and its bowl of clear kerosene colored red by the bits of flannel. She loved to look at the fire in the fireplace, flickering and changing all the time, burning yellow and red and sometimes green above the logs, and hovering blue over the golden and ruby coals.

     There are other constructions that we could look at, but any analysis of them becomes complex because of formulas. Here, for example, is the chart for appositives:
 

At first, it appears that the students are more adept with appositives than are their textbooks, but the fourth graders’ appositives are almost entirely either names or lists of "concrete" things, as in "my brother Peter," or "There are five people in my family my mom, my dad, and my two brothers". The English text, on the other hand, also includes "listing" appositives, but the lists are of abstractions:

I saw writing as an activity with many rewards: good friends, a good living, and a way of getting the world to listen to my ideas. 

     Taken individually, each of the "problems" I have discussed may seem minor, but these constructions all inhabit the same textbooks and therefore have a cumulative effect. The problems are caused by constructions that are characteristic of written, as opposed to oral language. As Frank Smith argues:

written language may have the same basic vocabulary and grammatical structures as spoken language but the relative frequency of various words and structures differs. Spoken and written language are put together in distinctive ways. (143)

     My primary objective in this chapter, however, is not to present a detailed syntactic analysis of fourth grade textbooks, nor even to criticize those textbooks. Rather, I hope I have demonstrated that the syntactic component of "readability" involves more than just "sentence length," and that that component can be intelligently discussed using the same syntactic terminology that we have been using for other purposes. If we must have "readability formulas" (and, although I opposed them I am aware that many educators consider them necessary), then those formulas should take into consideration the frequency of clauses, gerundives, etc., based on what we know and can learn about natural syntactic development. We would probably be better off, however, if we were to trust in intelligent editors who understand some things about syntax and psycholinguistics and who have a good ear for students’ prose. My argument, after all, is not that fourth grade textbooks should exclude long gerundive phrases or noun absolutes or that they should statistically parallel the syntax of seventh graders’ writing. My argument is the same as what many good editors and educators have been saying all along -- textbook prose is unnatural. I have simply presented a statistical argument to counter the statistical approach of the formulas. Replacing or refining those formulas as a result of my argument will probably only result in abnormalities of different kinds.

     As I have stated throughout this book, statistical analysis should not provide conclusions, but it should raise questions. It is, in a crude way (but the only way currently available), a means for examining the syntactic difficulty resulting from the combinations of constructions within a text. Students can handle that difficulty, if they are introduced to it gradually and in an order that follows natural syntactic development. If we, as their coaches and trainers, do not follow such a gradual and natural sequence, we will be like the coach of a weightlifter who, having had his trainee practice doing bench presses with 20 pound weights, suddenly enters him into competition where he will be expected to press 200. Put another way, the question is this: are we preparing our high school graduates such that they -- all of them -- will be able to understand the following sentence, a sentence with three second level embeddings and a compounded infinitive as a delayed subject?

     When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

1. Why, within the English profession, is the teaching of reading separated from the teaching of writing?

2. What are the different readability formulas? What do they measure? Are you familiar with any that take syntsctic structure into account? 

3. Why should teachers of K - 3 read this chapter?

4. Most of this chapter is based on statistics. Is the statistical analysis convincing? Is there a better way to attack the problem of syntactic complexity in reading material?
 

Click here for the directory of my backgrounds based on art.
[For educational use only]