The CATESOL Journal

Many students who are nonnative speakers of English, yet highly proficient, are placed into basic writing or English as a Second Language courses when they enter college. While these students may have advanced oral English proficiency, their writing frequently suffers from a lack of training in academic writing and commonly contains fragments and run-ons, a frustrating sentence-level problem for these students. A review of current writing texts uncovered a general failure to treat these problems as a sentence-boundary issue. The approach taken here is that such students will be able to monitor their writing for incorrectly formed sentences if given a system designed to help them understand English sentence structure. The key concept is Glue, a term used for all clause markers. Working through exercises, in which they label the Glue and systematically identify fragments, run-ons, and complete sentences, students see a system emerging, which brings them to an understanding of English written conventions. Using Glue, the students gain control of their writing and are able to avoid fragments and run-ons.