8. For Students Who Need Additional Support with Sentence Combining

Using conjunctions comes quite naturally to many students. Native English speakers, English Learners and students who speak dialects such as African American English (AAE) often use conjunctions effectively. However, this is not always the case for students with dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD). 

• Since students with dyslexia often focus so much cognitive energy on decoding, spelling, and transcription, they may miss the subtle meaning conveyed by conjunctions when reading or fail to use them effectively when writing. 
• Students with DLD may have even greater difficulty because conjunctions require an understanding of syntax and language relationships, which are two areas specifically impacted for these individuals.

Given these difficulties, it's common for students with language-based learning differences to produce writing that reads like a stream of consciousness, much like you see in the sample below:

Notice that this writer had lots of ideas to share, but misused the conjunction and, which can confuse readers. Simply directing the student to revise their writing likely won't help; students with dyslexia often struggle to detect their own errors. They may read it back as if the relationships between the ideas are clear, even though the repeated use of and obscures the intended meaning. The student may not independently recognize that a conjunction such as but or so would better communicate the connection between the ideas.

To support these learners in improving their writing, explicit instruction in the use of conjunctions for writing compound and complex sentences is essential. Students need direct teaching that helps them notice how conjunctions change meaning, repeated guided practice using them in authentic reading and writing tasks, and structured opportunities to monitor their own writing with support of checklists or questioning. 

Beyond the instructional strategies and activities discussed in this skills explainer, the following approaches can also be very helpful:

1. Give a sentence starter and conjunction. In this activity, students are given the first clause of a sentence along with a conjunction, and they must generate a second clause that logically follows to support the meaning of that conjunction. This helps students think about the semantic relationship created by the conjunction. 

Example:
Student prompt: Kim studied hard, so ____________.
Possible student response: Kim studied hard, so she passed the test.

Here, the conjunction so signals a cause-and-effect relationship, so the student must create a second clause that shows a logical result.

Here is a sentence starter practice activities to give students extra practice. 

2. Replace and maintain meaning. Once students have learned to write complex sentences using common subordinating conjunctions such as after, before, when, while, until, and since, they can learn to replace a conjunction with another word or phrase that preserves the meaning of the sentence. This helps students understand that some conjunctions serve similar functions, while others change the relationship between ideas. 

Since replacing the conjunction might require changing the sentence structure, this type of activity deepens both semantic understanding and syntactic awareness as students learn to think flexibly about sentence structures.

Example:
Original sentence: I was tired, so I went to bed early. 
Possible student response: Since I was tired, I went to bed early.

Both so and since communicate cause and effect, so the sentence meaning stays the same even though the structure and conjunction changes.

Here is a practice activities to give students extra practice with replacing conjunctions.