SLPs are in a position to make a huge impact on our students’ language skills.
But here’s the challenge a lot of us face when it comes to helping our students:
Most of us are so good at using language, we use it without thinking.
Over time we lose the ability to explain HOW we do what we’re doing…simply because we just don’t ever think about it.
Unfortunately, things don’t come easy for our students. They often need a more direct explanation of “the rules”.
And we need to be prepared to give those explanations to them.
Yet that’s no small task…simply because it’s hard to explain something we do so well to someone who’s struggling with the same skill.
Which is exactly why there’s a plethora of adult “how to guides” like:
Patricia Osborn’s “How grammar works: A self-teaching guide” or Laura Justice’s & Helen Ezell’s “Syntax handbook: Everything you learned about syntax-but forgot”.
If you scroll through the reviews for either of these books, you’ll find many readers admitting that they’ve forgotten a lot of what they learned in their 5th grade language arts class (and some admitting they never learned the rules in the first place).
This is EXACTLY why I create resources to walk SLPs like you through the syntax skills your students need for high-level language comprehension, like the Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure.
Second, if you visit any discussion group on language therapy, there are loads of questions that come up on the nuances of language…from how to actually target grammar and syntax, or how to analyze the sentences their students are saying.
I know a ton of them come up within my own mentoring programs such as Language Therapy Advance.
That’s why today with this post series, I wanted to do three things for you:
- Give you a chance to test your “syntax IQ” to see how well you understand a couple simple, yet powerful language skills (keep reading for quiz).
- Show you exactly how to explain those skills to your students.
- Pinpoint some of the key foundational skills your students will need in order to have solid comprehension skills.
So let’s dive in.
Why should we even care about syntax?
So first question: Why do we even want to address syntax? Why is this such an important linguistic area for us to understand?
Do we need to spend time focusing on linguistic minutia when the end goal is just getting our students to comprehend the “big picture”?
The answer: YES!
As long as we’re focusing on the right minutia. Because there are A LOT of them and we’d drive ourselves batty trying to cover them all.
So what are the “right skills”?
When it comes to language development and comprehension, one of the biggest culprits behind comprehension difficulties is poor syntactic structure (Scott & Balthazar, 2010).
We won’t have the cognitive resources to understand the big picture if we can’t understand individual sentences (Zipoli, 2017).
Yet the narrow view of reading comprehension keeps a lot of us stuck. Many SLP activities you’ll find on sites like Teachers Pay Teachers and Pinterest are actually skipping right to the SYMPTOM of the problem, and not the CAUSE.
And that’s why so many kids are still struggling.
Many kids won’t benefit from comprehension strategy instruction without the underlying phonological, semantic, and syntactic knowledge needed to understanding individual words and sentences (Catts, Adlor, & Weismer, 2006).
So your first step in narrowing your focus is focusing on syntax directly, not implicitly.
Ok. I get why syntax is important. But where should SLPs start?
Now that we’ve identified that syntax should be getting our attention, we need to figure out what skills are important and what sentence structures tend to be difficult.
I dive deep in to this in my free e-book for SLPs, but I’ll give you the quick-and-dirty explanation right now.
One of the biggest culprits behind comprehension issues is poor understanding of complex sentences, particularly for kids with language disorders.
Seminal research done by Loban (1976) even found that use “subordination” is one of the biggest indicators of overall language skills, meaning that people who can use subordination tend to be more advanced.
(If you’re not sure what that “subordination” means, don’t worry…I’ll explain later in this series; for now just remember that complex sentences are a super-important skill).
However, one of the biggest challenges that come up among the SLPs I’ve mentored is “How do I explain this to my students?”
And then the concern, “But I don’t even remember all these terms! How am I going to teach them?”
For example, have you ever worked with kids who didn’t know what sentence was?
Maybe you asked them to “say a word in a sentence”, and they gave you some type of incomplete phrase that didn’t make sense?
And after that…you realized you needed to define a “sentence”…but you weren’t sure how to do it?
If that’s ever happened to you, you’re not alone.
One of the most powerful skills you can teach your students is complex sentences.
But in order to actually teach that skill, we need to back up and teach some less advanced sentence types so that kids can put all of the pieces together.
We also need to be able to teach kids what ISN’T a sentence.
That’s why today, for the first part of your “Syntax IQ”, I’m going test your ability to define and explain the following:
- A sentence.
- A phrase.
- A clause.
The Syntax Quiz for SLPs (part 1 of 3): How do you measure up?
Question #1: What is a sentence?
Can you come up with an answer “on-the-fly” off the top of your head?
If not, no worries. Watch the video below for the answer.
Question #2: What is a phrase?
If students are going to understand how to say or write a complete sentence, they’re also going to need to understand phrases.
Why? Because usually when they fail to give you a complete sentence, they’re giving you a phrase instead.
To truly grasp the rules of what’s needed in a complete sentence, they need to be able to pick out the parts of that sentence (and know if they’re missing something).
If you aren’t sure how to explain phrases to your students, here’s an example of how to do it in the video below:
Question #3: What is a clause?
This one’s important because sometimes a clause is a complete sentence, and sometimes it isn’t.
And if we’re going to eventually create some longer, more sophisticated sentences, we need to know how to put multiple clauses together.
So…we need to know what a clause is.
Here’s how to explain that to your students:
So how’d you do?
If you nailed it, I’ve got more for you in the next “Syntax IQ” article, where we’ll talk about the difference between simple, compound, and complex sentences (and how to explain it so your students understand).
If you didn’t get all those answers right away, don’t worry.
As I said before, there’s a reason that resources like this and this exist.
A lot of us don’t walk around thinking about our phrases and clauses as we’re having conversations; which is why we often need to brush up on it before we study it with our students.
If you enjoyed this article and want to learn even more about how to teach your students’ the syntax skills they need to comprehend what they’re reading, you may want to check out my free e-book for SLPs.
It’s called the Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure, and it’ll walk you through those high-impact syntax skills your students need to process language so they can thrive in school.
References:
Osborn, P. (1999). How grammar works: A self-teaching guide. New York, NY; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
