How do I help students build syntactic awareness?

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"Syntactical awareness" ... what is that? It's that inherent knowledge of the rules of the language that you speak. So, for example, in English, we put our adjectives in front of words. So, if I say, "...the flat gray table," my adjective is in front of the table. In other languages — romance languages, — the adjectives come after. So I would say, " ... the table flat gray." Now that doesn't sound right to our ears, right? Because we've developed this sense of how the word should be in order within a sentence in the language that we speak, and that develops when children are very, very young. It's why we want to be reading to children and talking to children in complete sentences. So they build that ability to have syntactic awareness. Now, some students come to school with better awareness than others, but we can teach that. Now, there are several things — especially as it relates to writing, developing the ability to write a good quality sentence — that we know from research can be helpful.

One of those is called "sentence combining." There has been research on sentence combining from the 1950s and 60s and, over and over again, what it shows is that it is a way to develop syntactic awareness and develop students' ability to manipulate words in sentences. Sentence combining is very simple. I have a very simple sentence, "The movie was good, the book was good." Can you combine them into one sentence? "The book and the movie were good." Or, "The movie and the book were good." It's a very simple thing to do, and it's been found to be effective from kindergarten all the way up through college level. Now, one of the findings in the research — and Steve Graham and his colleagues who wrote a research report synthesizing it , it was a meta analysis of research, it was called "Writing Next" — and one of what they did was identified the 11 things that over and over again seem to show up as being effective for improving the writing of students in grades three and above. Sentence combining is in that list, and they make the point that it's even been much more effective in terms of developing that syntactic awareness than other forms of what's called traditional grammar. By traditional grammar, I'm referring to things where you label what part of speech is that, or where you ask students, "What is a noun, what is an adjective?" And so things like sentence combining that push students to manipulate words and play with words is going to do much more towards developing that syntactic awareness than the more traditional approaches to teaching grammar.