Sentence Combining
Of all of the activities that educators can engage their students in, sentence combining is the most highly researched. In this instructional approach, educators provide students with two or more simple sentences and have them combine them into one grammatically correct sentence. This strategy can begin with very simple sentences and ideas and increase in complexity. Educators can scaffold and guide students with specific prompts and arrangements in order to achieve the desired structures.
As with all explicit and systematic instruction, sentence combining activities can follow a scope and sequence. The following excerpt from Writing Next describes a sequence that would support students in building their skills in writing complex sentences:
In one approach, students at higher and lower writing levels are paired to receive six lessons that teach (a) combining smaller related sentences into a compound sentence using the connectors and, but, and because; (b) embedding an adjective or adverb from one sentence into another; (c) creating complex sentences by embedding an adverbial and adjectival clause from one sentence into another; and (d) making multiple embeddings involving adjectives, adverbs, adverbial clauses, and adjectival clauses. The instructor provides support and modeling and the student pairs work collaboratively to apply the skills taught.
In this video, we will explore different levels of sentence combining and how it can be embedded into contexts in different grade levels.
Resources
- Improving Sentences via Sentence Combining by Bruce Saddler
- Writing Next by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin
