Strengthening Sentences: Strategies

Strengthening Sentences: Strategies that fit under and extend on sentence imitation and sentence combining

The Killgallons use these strategies in their work with sentence composing:

1. Sentence Chunking (Identifying chunks of meaning within sentence)
   
2. Sentence Unscrambling (Unscrambling chunks for meaning)
3. Paragraph Unscrambling
   
4. Recognizing Matching Sentence Structures
5. Imitating Sentence Structures using new topics for the sentences.
6. Imitating Paragraphs
7. Imitating Long Sentences (Fellows from CUWP, Jeanette showed us this one with "Letter from Birmingham Jail.)
8. Decombining Sentences
9. Combining, then Imitating
10. Combining in Paragraphs
11. Sentence Expanding -- with words, with phrases, with clauses

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Anderson, in Everyday Grammar, discusses these strategies:

1. Deconstruct
2. Imitate -- show the model
3. Students imitate
4. Combine

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Bill Strong suggests that for basic readers you could use these sentence strategies:

1. Transcribing
2. Content-Based Dictation
3. Summarizing and Paraphrasing (after the teacher has broken a paragraph or passage up into a list of sentences.
   
4. Sentence Combining

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There are two major types of sentence combining requests:

• Open -- Students may chose to combine the sentences in any way that works.
  
• Closed (or Cued) -- The teacher narrows the choice for how the sentences may be combined. The student must use the teacher-determined method to combine the sentences, such as using an appositive phrase, a participial phrase, or an adjective clause.