There is a great deal of attention focused on students’ ability to recognize and understand words. Word recognition and word knowledge are important aspects of reading, and they require direct and systematic instruction to develop. Word recognition is a complex process of connecting phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). In addition, students must learn to apply their knowledge of words once they have decoded them.
And reading requires more than word recognition and word knowledge. Words are strung together into sentences, paragraphs, and longer texts. Accordingly, teachers focus on teaching their students reading comprehension strategies and knowledge about how texts work, such as text structures and genres.
But what seems to be missing from the conversations about quality reading instruction is the sentence-level work that students must do to understand what they read. It’s not that word recognition, word knowledge, and comprehension are unimportant; they are critical. However, students need to be taught to analyze sentences, especially complex sentences that pack a lot of information. As Shanahan notes (2022), not understanding the meaning of sentences impacts students’ comprehension, including their “ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.”
Unpacking Sentence Complexity
At the most basic level, sentences have a subject and a predicate. Of course, we must acknowledge that there are one-word sentences that pre-frame or provide a qualifier. Really? Yes. The sentences we’re talking about are longer; they have a subject and a predicate, often include objects, complements, and modifiers, and are built from words that can be combined in countless ways. Some of the aspects that increase the complexity of sentences include:
- Dependent clauses: a clause that cannot stand alone.
- Conjunctions, such as because, if, and when.
- Pronoun referents, such as they, it, and she that refer backward or forward to something in the sentence.
- Ambiguous phrasing that can be interpreted multiple ways.
- Uncommon vocabulary or words used in non-traditional ways or with rare definitions.
What seems to be missing from the conversations about quality reading instruction is the sentence-level work that students must do.
As a simple example of word placement, consider the following sentences:
- Only Batman fights crime.
- Batman only fights crime.
- Batman fights only crime.
The same four words are used in each sentence, but their different placement changes the meaning of each sentence. Thus, knowledge of the word only is important, but understanding the context of the entire sentence is required to accurately grasp the author’s intent.
Let’s consider some more intricate sentences from literature that may confound readers:
- Complex syntax and abstract language: “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself” (L’Engle, 1962, p. 102). In this case, the sentence uses a pronoun (its) that refers to an abstract concept (life) and includes a metaphor (sonnet).
- Fragmented, unexpected sentence structure: “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams, and misunderstanding more thrilling than understanding could ever be” (Morrison, 1987, p. 80). The sentence employs a passive voice and, as a fragment, refers to something previously stated.
All of these elements could challenge readers, but when explicitly taught and practiced, they help students not only understand sentences in the texts they’re currently reading, but also build analytical skills to interpret more complex sentences in the future.
Savoring Sentence-Level Learning
Fillmore and Fillmore (2012) encourage teachers to use a strategic approach to looking closely at language in one sentence at a time. At the heart of their strategy is a daily instructional session in which teachers lead students in a discussion focused on a single sentence, called a “juicy sentence,” drawn from the text the class is working on. The goal of these conversations is to help students unpack sentence-level information to internalize an awareness of the relation between linguistic patterns and the functions they serve in texts.
Student Achievement Partners (n.d.) outlines several steps for teaching students to analyze juicy sentences. The teacher should:
- Share the sentence (chart paper, smartboard, handout, etc.) from a complex, grade-appropriate text.
- Color-code the individual “chunks” (words and phrases).
- Read the sentence aloud.
- Parse the sentence, inviting students to figure out and explain what each part means.
- Discuss the text features (e.g., grammatical structures) and vocabulary included in each part.
- Ask questions and provide conversational starters that direct students’ attention to sentence features. For instance, “Who or what is this sentence referring to when the word its is used?”
- Invite students to describe what the sentence means as a whole.
- Discuss the sentence in context with the whole text.
In the video that accompanies this column, high school English teacher Alexandra Prince has selected a juicy sentence for her students to analyze. She has parsed the complex sentence into sections and works students through these parts to build their understanding.
Building Comprehension Through Sentences
Integrating sentence-level learning helps students develop skills in reading. They use their word recognition and word knowledge skills but do so in complex sentences that may otherwise compromise their fluency and comprehension. Instruction at the sentence level is a necessary aspect of quality reading instruction.
Video Reflection: Juicy Sentences
After watching the video, consider the following questions for reflection or discussion with your colleagues.
- The elapsed time for this lesson is 24 minutes. Why might the teacher devote this much instructional time to juicy sentences?
- What texts might be useful for this protocol, and how does text selection contribute to students accessing complex texts that are conceptually linked with content being taught in class?
- How might you identify texts that allow for instruction in various aspects of sentence complexity, such as complex noun phrases (nouns that are modified or expanded by other phrases), adverbial clauses, passive voice, literary devices (such as metaphor or simile), unclear pronoun referents, or vocabulary used in ways that are not common for your students?
