The covert piece often missing in reading intervention
Many middle and high school students can read the words on a page but still struggle to understand what they just read. The problem isn’t always vocabulary or decoding. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle is syntax.
If students cannot make sense of how words fit together in a sentence, comprehension quickly falls apart. As texts become more complex in secondary classrooms, syntax becomes one of the strongest predictors of whether students can successfully understand grade-level reading.
What Is Syntax?
Syntax is the system of rules that determines how words, phrases, and clauses work together to create meaningful sentences.
Think of vocabulary as the building materials and syntax as the blueprint. Students may know the meaning of every individual word, but without understanding how those words work together, the message gets lost.
For example, consider this sentence:
Although Maya studied diligently, she forgot to bring her calculator to the exam.
A student might be able to decode every word and know what each word means. But understanding the whole sentence requires more.
The reader has to recognize that Maya did the studying, understand the relationship between the two parts of the sentence, and recognize that “although” signals a contrast between what we might expect and what actually happened.
When students cannot untangle sentence structure, they often misunderstand the author’s meaning.
Why Does Syntax Matter for Older Struggling Readers?
Syntax and reading comprehension are connected. Research with ninth- and tenth-grade students found that syntactic knowledge contributed significantly to reading comprehension even when researchers considered other factors, including word reading, vocabulary, and short-term memory.
That’s important for those of us who work with older struggling readers.
As students move through middle and high school, they encounter increasingly complicated sentences. Academic texts may contain multiple clauses, embedded information, unfamiliar sentence patterns, pronoun references, and relationships that are communicated through conjunctions and other connecting words.
These structures require students to hold several pieces of information in working memory while connecting them into one complete idea.
A student can read all the words correctly and still have trouble figuring out what the sentence is saying.
You might see a student:
- Lose track of who or what the sentence is about.
- Misunderstand which noun a pronoun refers to.
- Miss the relationship between two ideas.
- Understand individual pieces of a sentence but not the sentence as a whole.
- Read word by word instead of grouping words into meaningful phrases.
- Need to reread long sentences many times.
Research with struggling adolescent readers has also found relationships among syntactic awareness, phrase reading, and reading comprehension, giving us another reason to pay attention to sentence structure when students struggle with connected text.
What Secondary Teachers Need to Know
Many adolescents have never received explicit instruction in sentence structure after elementary school. Instead, they are expected to absorb increasingly sophisticated syntax simply by reading more.
For struggling readers, that approach is rarely enough.
Explicit instruction helps students learn to:
- Identify subjects and predicates.
- Recognize phrases and clauses.
- Understand pronoun references.
- Notice conjunctions and transition words.
- Break apart long sentences.
- Combine simple sentences into more complex ones.
- Read with phrasing that matches the meaning of the sentence.
The goal is to prepare students to read grade-level text that uses sophisticated syntax.
How Can You Measure Syntax?
Unlike decoding or fluency, syntax doesn’t have one widely used classroom assessment. Instead, teachers gather information from several simple activities, which are worthwhile in their own right. Note which students have difficulty with more than one of these activities, and use that information to guide your syntax instruction.
1. Ask Students to Explain a Sentence
Start with sentence comprehension.
Give students increasingly complex sentences and ask them to explain what each one means.
For example:
Before the team could leave the field, the officials asked the players to return to the sidelines.
Ask:
“Who asked?”
“Who returned?”
“What happened first?”
“What does ‘before’ tell you?”
A student who can decode the sentence but cannot answer these questions may need support with sentence-level language.
2. Ask Students to Fix a Sentence
Give students a sentence with words in the wrong order or with a grammatical problem.
For example:
Yesterday to the library went Marcus.
Can the student recognize that something is wrong?
Can the student fix it?
Tasks involving grammatical judgment, correction, and word ordering have been used in research to examine syntactic awareness.
3. Try Sentence Combining
Give students two or three short sentences and ask them to combine them.
For example:
The storm arrived.
The winds increased.
Trees fell.
A student might write:
When the storm arrived, the winds increased, and several trees fell.
Now you can see how the student handles conjunctions, clauses, punctuation, and relationships between ideas.
Sentence combining has a long history as an instructional practice and has shown benefits in some studies. Research on its effects on reading comprehension is mixed and effects appear to vary by age and study, so use sentence combining as one piece of your syntax picture, not as your entire assessment.
4. Deconstruct a Complicated Sentence
Take a challenging sentence directly from something your students are reading.
Instead of asking students to label every grammatical component, start with meaning.
Ask:
“Who or what is this sentence about?”
“What is the main action?”
“What information could we temporarily remove and still have a complete thought?”
“Which words connect the ideas?”
“What does this part tell us about the rest of the sentence?”
You can mark up the sentence, draw lines between related words, box phrases, slash between meaningful chunks, or physically cut a sentence into sections.
For older struggling readers, making an invisible language structure visible can make the sentence much easier to tackle.
5. Look at Conjunctions and Connecting Words
Small words can carry a lot of meaning.
Consider the difference between:
She went to practice because she felt better.
and
She went to practice although she felt worse.
A student who ignores “because” or “although” can completely misunderstand the meaning of the sentence.
Try removing a conjunction and asking students which word belongs in the blank. Better yet, ask them how different conjunctions would change the meaning.
You’re checking more than vocabulary. You’re checking whether students understand the relationship between ideas.
6. Look at Student Writing
Writing gives you another window into students’ syntactic knowledge.
Notice patterns such as:
- Frequent fragments
- Run-on sentences
- Confusing pronoun references
- Difficulty connecting related ideas
- Heavy reliance on short, simple sentences
- Difficulty expanding a sentence with meaningful details
A single writing sample shouldn’t determine whether a student has a syntax weakness, but several samples can help you notice patterns.
7. Listen to Students Talk
Because speaking and listening are the basis for reading and writing, don’t overlook oral language. Ask students to retell part of a story, explain a process, or summarize something they’ve learned. Listen to how they organize ideas into sentences.
Do students connect ideas clearly? Are they using complex sentences? Do they lose track of pronoun references? Can they explain relationships such as cause, contrast, and sequence?
Oral language can give you another piece of the puzzle.
Simple Ways to Monitor Progress
You don’t need lengthy tests to monitor syntax growth.
Each week, ask students to:
- Identify the subject and predicate.
- Explain one increasingly difficult sentence.
- Combine two or three simple sentences.
- Expand a sentence by adding meaningful phrases or clauses.
- Rewrite awkward sentences more clearly.
- Read complex sentences aloud with appropriate phrasing.
These quick activities make growth easy to observe over time.
A Logical Progression for Teaching Syntax
There’s no single research-established sequence of syntax skills that every older struggling reader must follow. Your sequence should depend on what your students already understand and where their comprehension begins to break down.
Our favorite progression moves from:
- Subjects and verbs
- Complete sentences
- Simple sentences
- Expanded simple sentences with prepositional phrases, relative clauses, adjectives, and adverbs.
- Compound sentences
- Complex sentences
- Conjunctions and the relationships they signal
- Compound-complex sentences
The goal is not to overwhelm students with numerous grammar worksheets; it’s to provide students the tools they need to glean meaning from grade-level text.
The Bottom Line
Syntax isn’t the explanation for every comprehension problem. Older struggling readers may have difficulty with decoding, fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, comprehension monitoring, or several of these at the same time.
Research on interventions for students in grades 6 through 12 supports addressing the specific reading components that are limiting comprehension rather than treating struggling readers as though they all have the same needs, so syntax deserves a place in that conversation.
When a student can read the words but can’t make sense of the sentence, look a little closer at the sentence itself.
Sometimes helping a reader understand an entire passage starts with helping them understand how one sentence works.
For More Information
For resources that build syntax skills, visit our TpT store’s Grammar section or our website store’s Grammar section.
If you receive our biweekly newsletter, be sure to check our Freebie Library for additional syntax-building materials.
