Teaching Recognition of Complete Sentences - The Fundamental Things Apply - What Really Works - Teaching Grammar

Teaching Grammar: What Really Works (2010)

Part I. The Fundamental Things Apply

Part One explains how you can teach the building blocks of language, starting with recognition of complete sentences in Chapter 1 and moving on to sentence components and the basic patterns of English sentences in Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 explains how to teach verbs and their modifiers, adverbs. We want students to start organizing their written language around verbs. We use the metaphor of the map of geographical territory to explain the English verb system. This territory has a railroad track dividing its two sections: the action verbs and the linking verbs, along with the helping verbs. By leading students, region by region, through this map, we can give them a gradual but durable understanding about verbs, the nerve center of all sentences.

English grammar is a two-fisted powerhouse. If one fist is the verb, the other is the noun. In Chapter 4, we explain how nouns can be recognized beyond the “person, place, or thing” definition. Furthermore, we show how nouns act as magnets for their modifiers, forming noun phrases and noun clauses. And single nouns as well as nominal groups (nouns plus their modifiers) get replaced (as we say, “gobbled up”) by pronouns. Pronouns, in turn, take their forms (cases) on the basis of their function in the sentence. Chapter 4 also touches on how knowledge about nouns, nominal groups, and pronouns affects reading comprehension.

In Chapter 5, we talk about conjunctions and prepositional phrases, treating both as linking devices.

Chapter 1. Teaching Recognition of Complete Sentences

“A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.”

“A sentence has a subject and a predicate.”

“A sentence has a subject and a verb.”

“A run-on sentence is a sentence that goes on and on.”

“You are not allowed to begin a sentence with and, but, so, or because.”

These sound bites about sentences have not been sufficient to help students create, manipulate, control, punctuate, or advance a basic sentence. Let’s first look at why these notions fall short.

While it is true that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought, the concept of “complete thought” is abstract. Because the back-and-forth of conversation does not require that complete sentences be uttered, students, especially those who are not habitual readers, do not feel the cadence of written sentences. (Of course, much of what children read is dialogue and thus not written with complete sentences anyway.)

When students who are habitual readers do become accustomed to the drop in the voice that ends a declarative sentence, they don’t really need a teacher’s definitions of what a sentence is. For them, the “group of words that expresses a complete thought” definition might seem to work, when in fact they have developed, through reading, an auditory intuition that tells them when a sentence ends. So, of course, the best way to have students get the feel of what a complete (declarative) sentence is would be to promote a lifestyle that includes substantial amounts of reading. Until then, and while teachers are working to make that happen in their communities, they do need explicit strategies that help students recognize unintentional fragments and run-on sentences in their own writing.

Arguably, having students compose complete (declarative) sentences is Job 1 when it comes to grammar instruction. Certainly, they’ve been taught in the early elementary grades what a complete (declarative) sentence is, and they’ve been told to write with complete sentences. Let’s have a look at four rhetorical situations that can be problematical:

Of the four kinds of sentences (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory), the only one that concerns us, as far as writing complete sentences goes, is the declarative sentence. In our discussion and in the classroom activities, we are talking primarily about declarative sentences.

1.Not all groups of words are expected to be complete sentences. Titles, signs, bits of dialogue, answers to questions, items in a list, entries on a blog, text messages—these are genres of language that do not have to be in complete sentence form. As a teacher, you may take for granted that when you ask students to write something, they know you want complete sentences. But in the student’s world, as in the real world, complete sentences are not always required. If your students are having difficulty adapting to the norms of written expression for academic genres, you may need to take a closer look at those situations that require complete sentences and those that do not. You may need to heighten your own awareness of those times when complete sentences are not expected in writing. Only by acknowledging that there are times when complete sentences are not expected can you clarify for your students the times when they are expected.

2.When students are asked a question orally, they do not necessarily produce a complete sentence in response. However, when you ask students a question calling for a written answer, you do expect a complete sentence in response. You expect the written answer to be different, grammatically, than a spoken answer would be to the same question. For example, you orally ask this question: “Why does Cassius persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy?” A few hands go up. You call on a student. She responds, “Because Brutus had a lot of influence in Rome, and they could never get away with the assassination unless Brutus was in on it.” You would not tell the student that she cannot begin a sentence with because. Yet if the same question appears on a test, you would probably expect the written answer to incorporate the question: “Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspiracy because . . .” However, the incorporation of the question within the answer is not a natural response. It is, in fact, an unnatural, contrived, and even strange response because the reader obviously knows what the question is. In informal written discourse, such as text-messaging, no one would expect answers to incorporate the wording of the questions that prompt them. The point is that because spoken Q&A is not carried on with complete sentences, teachers need to teach explicitly the counterintuitive convention of incorporating the question into a written answer. For the record, we think that insisting that students incorporate the question within their written answer is unnecessary. However, we support your efforts to teach them to do so if only because so many other teachers expect it. The larger point is that when students do something repeatedly and naturally, and teachers don’t like it, they need to think analytically about the difference between spoken and written English and how natural it is for students to want to reproduce spoken English on the page as closely as possible. After all, in their world of text messaging and social networking, that is exactly what they are doing . . . and successfully.

3.Subordinate clauses cause a lot of problems because they do have a subject and a predicate. Think about the kinds of sentence fragments that your students produce. We’re betting most of these sentence fragments begin with either a subordinating conjunction or a relative pronoun. In other words, the problem is usually that the sentence fragment is part of a complex sentence, a part that decided it was a sentence. Given that the subordinate clause does have a subject and a verb, and given that all you have to do to make it a complete sentence is delete its first word (subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun), it is a near-sentence, almost-a-sentence. It’s very easy for a novice writer to think a subordinate clause is a sentence. What the novice has to do is to be aware of the kinds of words that begin subordinate clauses (subordinating conjunctions and relative pronouns) and learn that almost-sentences that begin with these words should probably be attached to the previous sentence (the main clause).

You might ask your students to think of the situation metaphorically: Picture a child pulling another child in a wagon. The child in the wagon (subordinate clause) cannot move unless he is pulled by the child whose feet are on the ground (main clause).

4.When novice writers get warmed up, their fluency takes over. The expression of connected ideas is a stronger force than the need to separate those ideas into sentences. Hence, they write run-ons. We will address the problem of unintentional fragments first; then, we’ll talk about run-ons.

Addressing the Problem of Fragments

Here we give you four alternative ways of getting students to recognize a complete (declarative) sentence beyond the traditional “complete thought” definition.

1.The “Guess what?” test: If you say “Guess what?” and a group of words makes sense after that, then that group of words is a complete (declarative) sentence. The “Guess what?” test should be used as your default technique for determining whether a group of words is a complete (declarative) sentence. The reason it works is that saying “Guess what?” sets up the expectation that a complete sentence is about to be spoken or read. Use the other three tests only if the “Guess what?” test does not work for a particular student or group of students.

2.The “sentence thud”: What we are calling the sentence thud does have a fancier name: Linguists call it the terminal fall, the drop in pitch and halt in pace that English speakers use at the end of a sentence. We’re using the inelegant term sentence thud rather than terminal fall because we think an accessible, memorable, descriptive term is more likely to work with students than a term they would probably never again hear outside the field of linguistics.

From a very early age (infancy, some think), children begin perceiving the relationship between the rhythm and pitch of language and the units of meaning. The fall of the voice at the end of a (declarative) sentence is a feature of English. Adults exaggerate this feature when they read aloud to children, another reason that children who have been read to from an early age are advantaged when it comes to literacy.

Some students may be able to become more sensitized to the terminal fall. To practice, set up partnerships of students and have them read aloud to each other. You will have to model how the voice drops in pitch at the end of a declarative sentence. The reader’s job is to exaggerate the sound of the spoken sentence, emphasizing its terminal fall. The listener’s job is to count how many sentences she has heard.

Note that the terminal fall applies only to declarative sentences. Questions that call for a yes-or-no answer usually end with a rise in pitch. (Wh questions and how questions typically have a falling pitch.) Commands begin with verbs (or the word please), and the speaker usually emphasizes the verb in a command.

3.The Yes-or-No Question Test: A complete (declarative) sentence can be expressed—translated—into a yes-or-no question with the help of a helping verb. This is just how the structure of the English language works. So students can test whether a group of words is or is not a complete sentence by seeing if they can turn it into a yes-or-no question. Like the “Guess what?” test, the yes-or-no question test relies on a student’s intuitive knowledge about English sentences.

4.Who or What? What About It? The previous tests for sentence completeness rely on a student’s having enough experience with the English language to have developed intuition. But some students may not have sufficient experience in the English language to use these methods. They may need to use their analytical skills to grasp the notion of a complete sentence. A complete (declarative) sentence gives two kinds of information: Who or what is the sentence about? (the subject) and What are we saying about it? (where it represents the subject).

Through formative assessment, you can determine whether students are having difficulty understanding the concept of a complete (declarative) sentence.

Formative assessment consists of the observations teachers make during routine classroom lessons and interactions, as well as the various kinds of data they collect as they work with students over time. Much of the formative assessment that would determine the extent to which students understand the concept of a complete (declarative) sentence would take place as teachers guide students through the writing process.

Teaching Procedure

This is an engaging group of activities that may be used repeatedly on any level. It offers the dual benefit of exposing children to a variety of books while they happen to be learning grammar.

This lesson takes place in the library. Plan on one or two days. To prepare, ask the librarian to help you distribute a stack of books, about twenty-five books, on each table. Fiction books will work best. Choose some titles that are complete (declarative) sentences and some titles that are sentence fragments. The idea is to have the students use one of their sentence-testing cues to determine which titles are complete sentences and which are fragments. Students decide on a sentence-tester they would like to use, then separate the books into two piles accordingly.

Establishing these two piles of books, those whose titles form complete (declarative) sentences and those that do not, sets up your students to advance their knowledge of grammar by doing any of the following:

1.Learn by categorizing: What kinds of fragments do we have? Have students do some categorical analysis of the sentence fragment titles. What you ultimately want them to see is that some sentence fragments are fragments because they are just phrases (not having both a subject and a predicate); others are sentence fragments because they are subordinate clauses (that is, subject-verb units with a subordinating conjunction stuck on): If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Where the Sidewalk Ends, How the Zebra Got Its Stripes. Don’t use terms like subordinate clause and subordinating conjunction just yet. You want students to discover that they already know the concept behind such terms before giving the concept a label. You might say something like this:

Look at your sentence fragment pile. Do you see any sentences that live inside these sentence fragments? Let’s make a separate pile of the books that have sentence fragments containing whole sentences within them. Then, what we’ll have left over will be sentence fragments that are just phrases. For one pile, we have to take away a word to make a complete sentence. For the other, we have to add a word or words to make a complete sentence.

Even if you decide that now is not the time to introduce the grammatical terms, your students will benefit from understanding that some sentence fragments can be made into whole sentences by adding words; others can be made whole (ironically) by taking a words away.

2.Learn by comparative analysis: Students need to learn that the length of a group of words is not the deciding factor in whether the group of words constitutes a complete sentence. You can tell them that, but a hands-on activity in which they can actually see sentences and nonsentences side-by-side makes the point come alive. To make that happen, instruct students to reorganize their books into four groups:

a.Group 1: Titles having five words or more that are complete sentences

b.Group 2: Titles having five words or more that are not complete sentences

c.Group 3: Titles having fewer than five words that are complete sentences

d.Group 4: Titles having fewer than five words that are not complete sentences

What this activity illuminates is that short groups of words can constitute complete sentences and that longer groups of words are not necessarily complete sentences.

3.Learn by making new combinations: How can subjects and predicates be exchanged? Students can learn about the two-part nature of a sentence (subject + predicate) and also about subject-verb agreement through this library activity. Have students write the titles that are complete (declarative) sentences on sentence strips. Then, give a quick explanation about how a (declarative) sentence consists of two parts: The first part tells who or what the sentence is about; the second part comments on the first part (what about it?) Decide, based on the level and readiness of the students, whether or not to use the term subject and predicate. Feel free to stick with who or what? and what about it? for now.

After the students have written the titles that are complete sentences, have them use scissors to cut each sentence into its two components. Then, have them mix all the components in the center of the table and then rearrange the subjects and predicates to form new sentences. (You can even ask them to tell you what a story with this new title would be about.)

Students will discover the concept of subject-verb agreement by doing this activity. They probably will not be able to express that the problem is called subject-verb agreement. They won’t say, “Well, this is a singular subject and I’m trying to put it together with the form of the verb that goes with a plural subject, so to create subject-verb agreement, I have to change one or the other.” But they will definitely see that “something is wrong—it doesn’t sound right.” They will know how to achieve subject-verb agreement, but not how to explain what they are doing as they do it. That is the teachable moment to explain what subject-verb agreement is all about and, most importantly, to show that they already know how to make subjects and verbs agree. Native speakers of English develop a natural sense of subject-verb agreement.

Addressing the Problem of Run-ons

Perhaps the most important thing to be known about run-ons is that a long sentence doth not a run-on make. There’s a widespread misconception out there that a “sentence that goes on and on” is called a run-on. This misconception becomes even worse when students (and their teachers) then generalize to say that any long and complicated sentence may automatically be considered a run-on.

Teachers and students need to learn this: Whether a group of words that wishes to be considered one sentence is a run-on depends not on the number of words but on the manner in which the clauses within that group of words are marked. That is to say, writers need to do certain things for the reader’s clarification when they join clauses. If they don’t insert the proper hitching devices—punctuation, conjunctions, relative pronouns—then they have a run-on. If a run-on were a house whose walls were not joined properly, that house would fall apart regardless of its size. But even a house that is extremely large will hold up if its walls are properly joined.

Explaining Clauses:
A clause is simply any subject-predicate cluster.

Before we go on, let’s clarify some terminology about run-ons. When two clauses are joined by a comma alone (without any kind of conjunction), some people call that kind of mistake a comma splice. We like the term comma splice, but we accept the designation of the comma-but-no-conjunction mistake as a run-on (since it is a kind of run-on). The opposite structure—when a coordinating conjunction is present, but there is no comma—is what is technically called a plain old run-on. And when the two (or more) clauses are just jammed together with nothing official at all separating them—not even a relative pronoun—we call that kind of run-on a fused sentence. In real life, many teachers use run-on as an all-purpose term that includes the comma splice and the fused sentence. The point to emphasize to your students is that whether a structure is called a run-on depends not on the length but on the way in which the clauses are attached.

You can’t get students to recognize or fix run-ons until they see clauses, but you can nudge them toward clausal recognition by building on the four sentence-testers that we’ve delineated. If students are using the “Guess what?” test, ask them how many “Guess what’s?” they are seeing in a compound or complex sentence. Then, get them to notice how those “Guess what?” groups are attached. Slowly, convert the usage of “Guess what?” into the term clause: How many clauses are there? How are the clauses attached?

Conclusion

The techniques we’ve recommended in this chapter work because they allow students to access their intuition about sentence completeness. Once students can recognize and create complete sentences, they are in position to understand that most sentences do consist of more than one clause, a situation that calls for some grammatical handiwork to join the clauses with punctuation, conjunctions, relative pronouns, or some combination of the three. In the next chapter, we’ll analyze the three basic clausal patterns in English and demonstrate how verbs determine various sentence (clausal) patterns.