Understanding how sentences are constructed and how they work is a crucial foundation for reading comprehension and writing success. Sentences are “the building blocks of all writing” (Hochman and Wexler, 2017). The way an author structures their sentences, the words they choose, the order in which they use them and how they connect ideas can greatly influence how easily a reader can understand a piece of text.

Sentences that are long, complex, or contain multiple ideas can be challenging to process, especially for students who have had less exposure to rich oral language or who are learning English as an additional language.

Developing strong sentence-level understanding helps students unlock meaning and move towards comprehending the ideas within a text.

There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). Students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures (Shanahan, 2025).

Building students’ understanding of syntax and syntactic awareness can be achieved through a variety of different activities. However, before we dive straight into them with our students we must be sure that we are confident in our own ‘teacher knowledge’ of sentence structure. For some of us this will be a steep learning curve as we were not taught syntax at school and therefore will need to build our own understanding first.

Personally, I was in this boat but have been fortunate enough to work with Dr Christine Braid. She is an extremely knowledgeable literacy educator and is extremely passionate about how the teaching of sentence types and how teacher knowledge about sentences can benefit students’ reading and writing. I highly recommend you explore her work, particularly if you are just embarking on this journey into sentences. Dr Braid’s book How to Build Writing Success – Sentence by Sentence (2024) is a fantastic resource. Therefore, I am not going to dive into building teacher knowledge here. I will leave that to the experts.

Sentence Combining Activity
Sentence combining is an effective method for helping students of all ages – in elementary grades through college – develop syntactic awareness to support comprehension and writing of sentences (Graham & Perin, 2007; Saddler, 2012). 

Sentence combining is a valuable activity that helps students develop their understanding of how sentences work. By joining two simple ‘kernel’ sentences together, students practice rearranging words, expanding ideas and creating clearer, more varied sentences. Sentence combining supports students in making deliberate decisions about sentence structure which improves meaning, gives greater language control and helps them become more confident writers and readers.

• Begin with two simple ‘kernel’ sentences. Add more sentences gradually. You may prompt students with cued words.
• Aim to combine sentences at least two times per week (10-15 minutes maximum).
• Can be done orally with students who are not ready to write all the words.
• Use ‘kernel’ sentences from class texts, shared books, students’ own written work, curriculum area texts (science).