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Essays. Paragraphs. Any piece of writing. They all begin with the same foundation: the sentence. Sometimes, though, teachers are expected to cram sentence-building lessons into a week or two, or there’s an assumption that if the students learned something the previous year, they don’t need to review the foundations. During the edLeader Panel “Enhancing Writing and Communication Through Sentence Building (Part 2): Teaching Complex Structures,” education experts discussed their recommended progression for creating more robust sentences, plus how their approach integrates social-emotional learning supports.

Before talking about sentence building, the panelists asked educators to think beyond the basic approaches to teaching grammar: traditional (think sentence diagramming), structural (focusing on the roles of words in a sentence), and transformational (looking at the core structure and how to move the words around).

Instead of these approaches, the panelists advocated for applied grammar. A combination of the three previous approaches, applied grammar has students use their knowledge in practical contexts to improve communication and language accuracy, rather than memorizing rules. Applied grammar not only has students working on writing earlier, but it also mimics the way the brain works, stacking, connecting, and integrating skills in a cumulative fashion.

Sentence Building Progression

• Core sentences: As explained in part one of this edLeader Panel series, core sentences consist of two pieces: the noun and its action. Using a prompt, typically a picture, students are asked to identify the nouns. Then, they come up with an action to explain what the noun is doing. For instance, a picture of an airport could elicit “Airplanes fly.” Another example may be, “Passengers wait.” The focus is on writing with an active voice. In addition, with even these smallest sentences, teachers can introduce opening capital letters and closing punctuation.
• Idea nouns: Still using the core sentence format, teachers challenge students to use nouns that aren’t limited to people, places, or things. Now, students can talk about ideas, emotions, and feelings elicited by the picture. For example, the airport picture could be “Anticipation abounds.”
• Direct objects and serial commas: Now, students are ready to think about an object or a set of objects. A direct object answers the question “What?” When listing multiple objects, students immediately learn the relevant rule of the serial comma. For example: “The flight attendants greet the passengers, the pilots, and the gate attendants.”

With this progression, students can then move on to asking more complicated questions, like where or why. Students will then add in prepositional phrases, conjunctions, adjectives, etc. Moreover, the core and expanded sentences a student would write in first grade are much simpler than what an eighth grader would create. As the students move through the progression across grade levels, they are able to understand and create more complex structures and use more sophisticated vocabulary.

One format that requires special attention is writing dialogue. Similar to other sentence writing, teachers should break it down into key components.

• Introduce dialogue as a conversation: Invite students to look at examples of dialogue and think about the different parts of a conversation. Using images with speech bubbles can help them visualize it. And keep it fun; these don’t have to be two people talking.
• Begin with dialogue tags: Have students start with basic tags (e.g., David said, David asked) and then talk about other words they could use. For instance, “David exclaimed,” “The parents whispered,” or “The officer commanded.”
• Create the spoken words: Separate from the dialogue tags, students should write the actual conversation. As previously mentioned, using pictures helps spark students’ imaginations.
• Connect the two parts: Now, students are ready to combine the conversation pieces. As with other sentence building, these will get more complex as they move from grade to grade. And once they’ve mastered basic dialogue, they can experiment with moving the tag into different parts of the sentence.

In addition to building confident writers, this progression reinforces social-emotional skills. For example, when students look at a picture and identify the nouns, they are using their own experiences to interpret the information. This validates their understanding, but they also benefit from hearing how other students interpret the picture. Similarly, when students are asked to name the idea nouns and talk about emotions, writing provides a safe space to explore them. Finally, dialogue lessons help students learn to communicate more effectively overall.

A paragraph or essay is only as good as its core sentences, yet sentence building remains a gap in many curricula. Learning how to confidently write increasingly complex sentences has so many benefits, from improved writing outcomes to advanced reading comprehension. Teachers should take time at every grade level to reinforce and continuously build sentence skills to create confident communicators.

Read the article on part one of this edLeader Panel series.

Learn more about this edWeb broadcast, Enhancing Writing and Communication Through Sentence Building (Part 2): Teaching Complex Structures, sponsored by Triple C Writing.

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Article by Stacey Pusey, based on this edLeader Panel