A study was conducted to ascertain if the teaching of sentence building by means of specific sentence patterns would result in an increased use of these sentence patterns in the written compositions of second grade children. Writing samples were obtained from a group of second grade children both before and after the treatment and were analyzed for the number of modified T-units they contained. The experimental teaching technique, which involved a total of 15 lessons over a six-week period, used a noun-verb sentence pattern. Each new part of the pattern was developed through an oral, visual, and written stage. The lessons dealt with nouns, verbs, articles, adjectives, and adverbs and how these elements combined into various patterns. Initial capitalization and end punctuation were stressed as elements of a complete sentence. The results showed that the teaching method did not produce a statistically significant increase in the use of the same pattern in children's narrative writing. (FL)