B3. Language Conventions
In Grade 3, students build on their understanding of language conventions to improve their communication skills. They learn to use grammar, punctuation, and capitalization correctly to make their writing clear and effective. By applying these skills, they create well-structured sentences and organized texts that express their ideas in a meaningful way.
The Language Conventions chart found in Appendix B lists the specific expectations for syntax and sentence structure, grammar, capitalization and punctuation.
Students are expected to learn and apply these conventions through oral communication, reading, and writing. The chart indicates a continuum of learning – initial development, consolidation, and refinement – stretching from Grade 1 to Grade 9. While the chart indicates the windows when students are using the given structures in their writing, they will use and understand them in oral language much earlier.
General considerations for teaching language conventions
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.
Although learning is embedded in context, instruction should still follow a thoughtful, purposeful sequence, systematically teaching conventions from simple to complex. Emphasis should be placed on the function and role of a structure within a sentence, instead of simply its name.
Further Reading
- Reading Road Trip: Making Sense of Syntax with Nancy Chapel Eberhardt (podcast)
- Syntax Party with Margie Gillis (video)
- The Assessment of Written Syntax (article)
- Syntax: Somewhere between words and text (article)
- Syntax: Knowledge to Practice resource by Gillis & Eberhardt (book)
