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Text Chapter 1
Text Chapter 3

Chapter 2

This lesson explores sentences and nonsentences. The book will make a profound effort not to tell you what is and is not a complete sentence. Rather, it will rely as much as possible on your intuition as a native speaker of English. (If you aren’t one, you might be at something of a disadvantage since you won’t have such intuition. Keep your ears on! You’ll probably learn something anyway.)

Face-to-face:  In keeping with the above, your first instruction is to get into heterogeneous groups of four. I can define "heterogeneous" because it isn’t a grammar term. It means "diverse." Don’t be in a group with anyone who probably uses the same dialect you do. Avoid persons from your own home town, state, area of the country. If you drawl, find people who don’t. Also, avoid persons who come from your ethnic group, religion, or race, especially if they (or you) grew up in close contact with others of that ethnic group, religion, or race. Avoid your own age group, your own sex, teammates in the same sport, people who work the same kind of job you do ("Two, sunny-side, and a side of hash browns, Louie!"), and 1000 other things that make you talk alike. Of course, total heterogeneity in groups of four cannot be accomplished. Do the best you can. Those of you who are slow to make decisions might have to be a group of three. No groups of less than three, please.  Online:  We'll asssign groups a little later. You can just put your sentences on the Homework thread for consideration by your peers.

Your second instruction is to come up with three groups of words which your group agrees are complete sentences. That seems easy, but I want to make it harder for you. Be sure to make your sentences as diverse as possible. Make them all different kinds of sentences. Let me drop a few terms on you: simple, compound, complex, question, command, statement, exclamation, subordinate clause, infinitive phrase, prepositional phrase. There! Do what you will with them. I have no preconceived notions. I give them purely as gifts. You have ten minutes. That’s two minutes per sentence. Hurry up! The teacher gets bored just waiting and is not allowed to help you right now. Write in the book if yu wish.. Here! I’ll even give you some numbers:

1.

 2.

 3.

Face-to-Face and Online Homework Assignment: Try something different  in recognizing complete sentences and sentence fragments.  This is from Rei Noguchi, the author of Grammar and the Teaching of Writing:  Limits and Possibilities (1991). We can often determine whether a group of words is a complete sentence or a fragment by adding a "tag" question to it. For instance,  I might have the following:   "The children are playing in the park."  You probably already know whether this is a sentence fragment or not, but follow along anyway.  Add the appropriate tag question: "The children are playing in the park, aren't they?"   We can be fairly sure the group of words is a sentence because the tag question works.  Try the following:  "The children playing in the park."   Can you add an appropriate  tag question to it?  If you can't do so, you probably have a fragment.  Try some variations:  "Playing in the park behind the service station."  "With my mother and my older brother."

Homework Assignment:  Your assignment is to type a set of sentences and sentence fragments (three of each) and try out the Noguchi tag question test on each of them.