Summarized in 10 Bullet Points

Myers, A. S. (2003). ReMembering the Sentence. College Composition and Communication 54 (4)   610-628.

• Both ESL and native speakers of English have difficulties with writing sentences.

• Students have not been exposed enough to written English which would help them be better writers. The majority of language teachers would concur that the more students see and use formal written English the better they will learn and remember it.

• Language is learned in chunks and sentence combining/imitation activities are helpful for student writers.

• Novice writers are not familiar with common phrases that are used in academic writing.

• Sentence combining can help students learn formal vocabulary and collocations (words that co-occur).

• Sentence combining can also help students put academic vocabulary in their long term memory so they can retrieve it later for future writing.

• Grammar is not just rule based, but also entails familiarity with vocabulary in certain contexts.

• Second language teaching has turned away from the grammar translation method and leaned towards communicative language learning.  In other words, learning language is not just based on rules, but also acquiring the lexicon.

• Some suggestions for sentence and word teaching in the composition classroom would be templates, collocations and concordance.

• Composition scholars should remain open to other fields of study to glean understanding of how to best teach writing.