Improve sentence comprehension, and get better reading comprehension
Ready to join now?
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.
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.
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