Unlocking Sentences - Wilson Language Training

A simple orange stick-figure character sitting cross-legged while reading a book titled Ancient History. The character has a worried expression, scratching their head, with a scribbled black cloud above, symbolizing confusion or difficulty understanding the material.

A beige rectangular graphic with rounded corners containing a sentence analysis. The bolded heading states, There are too many words for word-by-word analysis. Below, the sentence The mischievous boys were making a ruckus in the gym. is displayed with each word labeled by its grammatical role, including article, adjective, noun, helping verb, direct object, and adverbial phrase.

It’s hard to analyze a sentence one word at a time

Traditional grammar instruction fails the students who struggle. It puts a huge strain on their brain’s built-in whiteboard: working memory.

Students’ internal whiteboards are only so big, so there’s a limit to how many words they can hold.

Memory goes hand in hand with understanding

Like disappearing ink, language fades from working memory in a handful of seconds.

When students lose words before they can work on and use them, their language gets all muddled up.

To teach sentence structure you have to keep memory in mind

Some grammar structures are known to be hard for students who struggle with language. They forget the words before they can work out their meaning.

We developed a way to teach these structures that lightens the memory load

Rather than teach students to memorize a zillion parts of speech, we show them how groups of words work together as a chunk.

They can see how the sentence is built and what each part means

With a clear way to fuse grammar with meaning, students can unlock any sentence they read.

A beige rectangular graphic with rounded corners displaying a sentence about the emperor penguin's egg. Various parts of the sentence are marked with yellow highlights, underlines, and symbols, indicating areas of focus for grammar or clarity analysis.

Students make gains across instructional settings

With Unlocking Sentences, students make measurable gains in sentence comprehension that transfers to writing.

Small group speech-language instruction outside the classroom brought about statistically significant gains on standardized measures of syntax competence.

Classroom-based speech-language services combined with Tier One instruction in grades four and five brought about gains across all ability levels.

A 3D bar chart comparing percentile scores of three students in September and May. September scores are represented by blue bars, while May scores are shown in yellow. The chart indicates significant improvement for all three students, with Student 1 and Student 2 reaching nearly 100 percentile in May.

By the end of one year, all students were able to:

define what a sentence is
transform fragments into complete sentences
identify, classify, and write compound sentences with 7 coordinating conjunctions
identify, classify, and write complex sentences beginning with 7 subordinating conjunctions
use visual symbols to identify sentence parts and their functions

With Unlocking Sentences, SLPs and educators can have a huge impact on literacy — not just with their students, but ALL students.

It was so exciting to see students talk about what they saw in their sentences. They had a common language with teachers, and their metalinguistic skills just soared.

Sue C., Director of Curriculum

I’m totally over the moon. I’m in a classroom right now and they are having a grammar lesson on what makes a sentence a sentence. I’m co-teaching it with the gen. ed. teacher, and the kids are getting it!! So amazing!

Whitney S., SLP

This afternoon I met with the 6th grade Humanities teachers, and we talked about co-planning and how to integrate me more into teaching about sentences. Doesn’t get better!!