What is Expressive Grammar

This chapter discusses a new approach to teaching productive sentence grammar to individuals with autism. It begins by discussing the importance of sentence-level grammar. It then turns to general strategies for eliciting active practice and optimizing feedback. Next it lays out a series of sample lessons that illustrate the instruction of singular and plural nouns, subject-predicate sentences, question discrimination, question asking, verb tense, negation, pronouns, and embedded sentences. It then discusses the proper scope and sequence of the curriculum and shows how it can be, and has been, automated into a software program that optimizes overall instruction, elicitation, and feedback: the SentenceWeaver program. The chapter concludes by moving beyond basic sentence grammar to discussing strategies for sentence revision in more sophisticated writing tasks.