Learning to use more complex sentences
- As students progress through their schooling, they work with more complex ideas and interrelationships.
- To express these adequately, students need to be able to write and say sentences of greater complexity.
- Teachers can scaffold students in learning to use more complex sentences, by helping them join together several simpler phrases.
- Three ways of scaffolding students in learning to use more complex sentences are: sentence combining; repeating and substituting word patterns; and building complex sentences in the context of information transfer activities.
The inquiry What makes sentences hard for learners? looks at the increasing complexity of sentences in academic learning materials as students mature and their learning advances. This inquiry looks at ways to help students say and write more complex sentences .
Because of the relationship between output (speaking and writing) and the acquisition of new language (see the inquiry Students working together ), when students begin to produce (say and write) more complex sentences, they also begin to understand such sentences better in their reading.
Why are some sentences and texts more complex?
As students’ learning progresses, more and more of the new ideas they engage with are based on complicated interrelationships with other ideas. Similarly, sentences at more advanced levels are often made up of many already-complex structures that are brought together and related to each other in particular ways.
To get a picture of this, you could analyse the complexity of the ideas and their relationships in the spoken and written sentences below, which are taken from the level 5 social studies curriculum exemplar A Question of Work .
What factors are responsible for the changing nature of work? (written)
There wasn’t much choice for women with no education, but people were motivated to work because they had to live and eat. You’d have to be motivated to be a maid because it would be a horrible job. There was no dole then. (spoken)
Students need to develop this type of complexity in their language in order to communicate clearly at deeper levels and learn to use more complex concepts. They need to become comfortable with using sentences like this so that they can use them fluently in spoken or written work.
Most students will need help from their teachers to build up their use of more complex words, phrases, and sentences. This help can be provided by effective scaffolding of their language. (See the inquiry How we scaffold language .)
