Last month, I ventured out on an academic expedition in which I searched for techniques for helping my students to improve their sentence structures. After searching for weeks, I realized that there is no preordained way to teach sentence structure. I must admit that my ambivalence has me torn between relief and displeasure. The feeling of relief derives from the fact that I finally have a solution to the problem and the I am slightly disappointed due to the fact that I do not have an easier solution to present to my students.
The remedy for the syntactic structure is simple. The most effective way to improve a student's writing skills is to help them with reading comprehension. First of all because, the only way to deal with the nuances that come with the teaching of prepositions, articles and diction is to make the students read the way native speakers of English use them. There are many inconsistencies that even Doctorate Professors of English consider to be convoluted. So, by teaching them to become efficient readers, I will also be teaching them to enhance their lexical skills, map syntactic patterns, and to juxtapose the differences between the rules of writing in their languages and in English.
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