Teaching Language Conventions
The Ontario Language Curriculum documents offer a valuable insight as to how to teach these language conventions:
These language conventions need to be introduced and developed within the contexts of
writing, reading, and oral communication, rather than in isolation, so that students can learn
to use them to communicate and comprehend in meaningful ways. Emphasis should be
placed on the function and role of a structure within a sentence, instead of simply its name.
Although learning is embedded in context, instruction should still follow a thoughtful,
purposeful sequence, systematically teaching conventions from simple to complex.
Instruction should focus on supporting students in understanding the function of these
conventions in well-crafted sentences, and in using them to build correct, sophisticated
sentences that effectively communicate meaning.
As educators, we must first develop a solid understanding of the conventions we aim to teach. Once we do, the next step is to identify opportunities within the content and contexts we already use, and intentionally embed learning experiences into them.
In the following sections, we’ll explore several learning structures and how they can be integrated into authentic content and contexts:
- Sentence Anagrams
- Sentence Expanding
- Sentence Combining
The final section will focus on the concept of text cohesion and explore strategies to help students navigate common text structures that often hinder comprehension.
