How to help kids create and understand sentences

What does it mean to be sentence smart®?

To be sentence smart means having the ability to read and decode a sentence’s meaning by understanding the purpose, position, and interrelationship of its parts. Sentence smart students can recognize, organize, and analyze complex sentences.

Why is it important to teach kids how to become sentence smart?

The following excerpt from an article published in the National Institutes of Health explains why students should be taught how to manipulate, recreate, and decode sentences.

“From the mid-elementary through the secondary school years, the main job of a student is to learn, and this takes place increasingly in the context of language that is written (not spoken), is expository/informational (not narrative), and is discipline specific. Functional linguists (Halliday, 1987) have provided rich descriptions of sentence-level patterns unique to each of these distinctions. Compared with spoken sentences, written sentences are lexically dense (having a higher proportion of content words, that is, nouns, adjectives, verbs) and nominally embedded (having a larger number of long NPs with both pre- and post-modification). Written sentences are also longer, with more instances of multiclausal embedding, where one clause is subordinate to another subordinate clause. Halliday (1987) used the term hierarchical to refer to written text, which he contrasted with the linear format of spoken language, where clauses are connected with coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) and common subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Others emphasize the fact that the writer, who has more time to make grammatical choices, uses a greater variety of complex structures than the speaker, who is under more stringent fluency constraints in real time (Biber, 2001).”*

The premise is simple: kids have to read academic writing, which because of its complexity is vastly different and more difficult to understand than spoken language. We don’t have to teach kids to speak; but we must teach them how to read and understand complex sentences because that’s how they will obtain and process the information they need to succeed in school and life.

* Scott CM, Balthazar C. The Role of Complex Sentence Knowledge in Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties. Perspect Lang Lit. 2013 Summer;39(3):18-30. PMID: 25821532; PMCID: PMC4373700.