Teaching Sentence sense and Sentence Craft

SENTENCE EXPANDING- The concept of what a sentence is actually tricky to teach.

 Students- have difficulty grasping this notion

 Teachers- present the definition of a sentence SEMANTICALLY
- Saying that a sentence is a complete thought
- But then the next question from the students is “what ‘s a sentence thought”
- Normally, we converse daily in incomplete or ungrammatical sentences that in still
effectively communicate as complete thoughts.
- Because the language is organized according to certain rules or syntactical
structures. It may be easier for students if sentences are defined not in terms of
meaning(semantics) but in terms of structure

Strategies:

BEGIN WITH A SIMPLE TWO WORD SENTENCE- “1 subject and 1 predicate.

ASKING QUESTION

- Subjects-
- Predicate
*we well be able to help students expand their sentence.

Activity:

- Get ¼ sheet of paper

- Write the subject on one page and the predicate on the other
- The expanded subject with one-word predicate
- The expanded subject and the predicate across the bottom
*with this strategy student will be getting involved in the activity

SENTENCE UNSCRAMBLING- not all sentences begin with the subject followed by the predicate. Once
students grasp the roles of the subject and predicate, it is time for them to manipulate the parts of as
sentence and experiment with word order.

- Teaches the grammatical constructions- word, phrases and clauses with all their
variety.

Activity:

- Groupings or individual activity

- Give an examples of unscrambling sentence then ask the student to arrange it in
proper way.

Ex. I to go want to the mountains

SENTENCE COMBINING- Another form of sentence manipulation

BENIFITS
 - The students can rely upon the knowledge they have in the structure of language.
- Sentence combining as a revision strategy to enhance style.

*revision strategy- students can learn differentiate the need to work first on revision in
terms of ideas and structure first and later work on editing in terms of grammar, spelling
and proofreading- PROCESS APPROACH

PRAGEMENTS BEGINNING WITH ADVERBIAL CONJUNCTIONS

- It will also help student used to showcase specific grammatical constructions and to
help students eliminate errors.
- CONJUCTIONS- because, since, although can begin a sentence that is the result of
combining two simple sentences.
- Students should notice that because words can appear either initially or medially in
a sentence

RELATIVE CLAUSES AND APPOSITIVES

- which, who and that

HUMAN SENTENCES- Students who have difficulty manipulating word order linguistically to grasp how
sentence combining can enhance style.

Activity

- Students work collaboratively and literally stand up and move around to construct
different versions of the same sentence.
- Have students form of four groups consist of six members
- Give each group a series of envelopes, one for each sentence that will be combined
into one human sentence, and one envelope of punctuation marks
- Challenge each group to stand up, pick up the cards, pass them out to the group
members, and begin moving around to arrange the words in the way that sounds
best.
- The number of words that must be arrange and the punctuation marks necessary
for different sentence constructions will cause student to use both hands.
- As students stand up in front of the class to model their human sentence, members
of the audience can ask them to change positions to see if the sentence might work
better way.
- As the students reconfigure, the rest of the class can literally see what difference
reordering their positions makes to the sentence.

SENTENCE SORTING- Hands on grammar activity that fosters understanding and appreciation of
sentence structure and sentence variety.

Syntactic sort- focus on sentence structure (a sort contrasting simple and complex sentences)

Semantic sort- focus on sentence meaning (sort of distinguishing between factual and interpretative
sentences)
Sentence sorting is active and fun. Students learn most when they sort with other students in groups of
three or four. They discuss and analyze sentences. They learn the important connection between form
and meaning in sentences and the variety of options they have in their grammatical knowledge. They
use this information when they write to enhance meaning. Grammar becomes purposeful.

PARTICIPLE PANTOMIME- Students need to go beyond manipulating sentences composed by others;

they need to generate and experiment with sentence of their own. Harry Nodden likens writing to
painting with words and notes that “just a painter combines a wide range of brush stroke techniques to
create image, the writer chooses from repertoire of sentence structures”

PANTOMIME-A way of expressing information or telling a story without words by using body
movements and facial expressions.

- One of the brush strokes that Nodden teaches is the concept of the participle and
participial phrase

Participle- is an ing-verb tagged on to the beginning or the end of the sentence

Participial phrase- is a participle along with any modifiers that complete the image.

- They dressed up like a verb, but they function as adjectives to describe nouns.

Pantomime Strategy- for interactive approach to engaging students in writing sentences with participles
and participial phrase:

- Talk about numerous models of ing-verb sentence.

- Dramatize a scene through pantomime for students to write about.
- Student should imagine the gestures to form or think of ing-verb sentence.
 - Invite the students to volunteer to think up their own pantomimes for the other
students to describe.

PUNCTUATIONS MYTHOLOGY- Punctuation is a persistent and troublesome aspect of writing because

of our misconception of it as a mechanical skill that can be routinized and made subliminal.
- Students have trouble “getting” certain aspects of punctuation because writers
often take certain licenses with the rules depending on what they are writing.
- Punctuation help the readers to make sense of what they are reading
- It tells us where and when to stop
- It notifies the reader of how much text must be retained in short-term memory

*because the punctuation actually helps students to make meaning, it is important that they know the
rules before they can consciously break them to create some intended effect.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ERROR?

 Encourage multiple draft writing so that students who need to can attend to
composing first and focus on editing in a later draft
 Pay attention to students’ ideas and let them know when errors interfere with my
understanding and/or appreciation of the meaning of the text.
 Resist the temptation to mark everything (although it can be difficult to see an error
and bypass it)
 Hold students accountable for the conventions I have taught in relation to the
writing task and then expects students to develop an accumulating repertoire of
skills over time.
 Refrain from doing the corrections for the students (which give me practice but not
them) but rather mark a problem area and invite the students to find and correct
the problem.
 Avoid making proofreading marks students don’t understand (the student of one of
our Writing Project teachers thought for an entire year that the teacher was putting
happy faces.
 Recognize that when a students are taking a risk and tackling a topic that makes
them stretch cognitively, or taking a risk linguistically by experimenting with style,
their surface errors may increase.
 Engage students in collaborating on editing their work and provide editing checklist
delineating what to look for.
 Look for patterns in students’ errors and conference with them one-on-one to talk
about what I notice
 Praise students when they do something correctly that they have had trouble with
in the past- and express appreciation for stylistically apt sentences
 Provide an incentive for students to correct their errors by awarding extra credit
points for editing done after final drafts have been graded
  Encourage students to keep track of their problems and their progress through a
personalized error log.

METHOD TO HELP STUDENTS SELF-CORRECT THEIR OWN ERRORS

Yes Twice, Comma Splice- common errors of student according to Rei Noguchi is the comma splice.

- Simple and effective method for detecting comma splices.

Steps:

- Students examine their own writing for sentences that have comma roughly in the
middle
- They then take a sticky note or three-by-five card and cover up the part of the
sentence that comes after the comma
- Students then check to see if the first part of the sentence has a subject and a verb
- They then cover up the first part of the sentence to check the words after the
comma, and follow the same procedures

*Huck’s rule is that if you can say yes twice (to whether you have a subject and verb in
each of the two parts separated by commas), and if there is no conjunction after the
comma.

* Teacher can also pull sentences with comma splices from a class set of papers and
have students correct them in partners.

SENTENCE DRAFTS- This strategy involves having students start at the end of their paper and, working
from the bottom up, hit the return key on the computer after each sentence. This results in each
individual sentence being printed on its own line.

STEPS:

- students read their papers backward, line by line, with sentences divorced from
their intended meaning, they can see the problems in their syntax more easily.
- If they read each sentence aloud, they can also hear where sentences have gone
awry.

EDITING CHECKLIST- Ultimately, our goal is for students to be able to edit their own writing with
confidence and competence. Providing students with a corresponding/editing checklist to use when
doing the final proofreading of their paper can be useful.

EDITING CHECKLIST

CHECKLIST YES NO
 I remembered not to punctuate my title either by underlining it or by
enclosing it in quotations
 I indicated new paragraphs by indenting.
 I used “yes twice, comma splice” to look for sentence errors and also
examined my sentences from the bottom up. I have also read the whole
paper aloud to myself.
 I kept the same verb tense throughout my essay unless the content dictated
a change.
 When I used pronouns, I made sure the noun each pronoun referred to was
clear.
 When I used prepositional phrases and modifying clauses. I made sure they
were adjacent to the words they modified.
 I have followed the conventions for quoting from the text.
 I have looked up in the dictionary every word I was uncertain of how to spell.