Students begin to build syntactic awareness — or "sentence sense" — through exposure to oral language when they are young. Syntactic awareness is the ability to monitor relationships among words in a sentence to understand while reading or composing text.
It’s important to remember that students will come in at varying levels of syntactic awareness due to differences in home language, dialect, oral language processing, and other factors.
Grade Level
Children under the age of 2 can understand the difference between two sentences in which the subject and predicate are reversed. For example:
Mommy is helping daddy.
Daddy is helping mommy.
By the time students enter the classroom in pre-K or kindergarten, most are able to give the correct answer when asked, “Which sounds better?” for this example:
Swims the duck.
The duck swims.
Students with solid sentence sense can recognize if a sentence is syntactically incorrect when they hear or read it. The level of syntactic awareness that students bring to kindergarten often depends on how much exposure to oral language they had prior to entering school.
Syntactic awareness, especially the ability to write effective academic sentences, should be taught to all students beginning in kindergarten. By third grade, most students have developed a basic understanding of the difference between a complete sentence and a sentence fragment. You should use the terms subject and predicate (rather than naming and action parts) by third grade.
Some students beyond third grade who have difficulty with sentence writing need continued instruction about sentence basics.
Prerequisite Skills
Writing basic sentences begins with the skill of letter formation. Formal instruction on letter formation, or handwriting, should occur in kindergarten.
To begin to write simple sentences, students need to know their letter names and sounds. This allows them to begin phonetic spelling (opens in new window). In phonetic spelling, students listen to the sounds they hear in a word and write the sounds as they hear them. Instead of writing, “The sun was hot,” the student might write, “Th sn wz ht.” Phonetic spelling, also known as invented spelling, is an important stage in spelling development.
