Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on August 13, 2022. There was no incident that led me to repost this on December 13, 2025, just my own sense that it would be a good idea to revisit this much neglected aspect of teaching students to understand text. Originally, there was no podcast of this and now there is, and this updated version includes both a link to that podcast as well as to the original blog that elicited 23 thoughtful comments.
What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension
Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, one might think such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning complicated sentences – undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.
Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on “prior knowledge,” vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, and comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence tends to get short shrift in most programs and classrooms.
While that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.
Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.
That blog articulated my opinions but neither marshalled the research evidence, nor provided much in the way of helpful instructional guidance. It called for action but was terse on specifics.
This piece should remedy those omissions.
To tell the truth, when I wrote that blog I didn’t bother to search for research on sentence comprehension because that topic never attracted much attention. There were some old studies indicating that teaching formal grammar had no impact on comprehension or writing. That seemed to settle it for most of us.
When I was working on my doctorate, a prominent reading scholar told me that, “Noam Chomsky is dead.” He was trying to dissuade me from squandering my time on something as pointless as sentence comprehension.
No matter my excuses, boy, was that a foolish oversight!
Over the past two decades – slowly, gradually – research on syntax and reading comprehension has accumulated. And, over the past couple of years, the numerous publications appearing in high quality psychological, educational, and linguistic journals suggests that being a sentence- comprehension researcher is now a respectable line of work, along with social media consultant or TikTok dancer.
First, the research.
The desert has become an oasis.
There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). Students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures.
Even more persuasive is that many such studies examined that relationship AFTER controlling for differences in decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, memory, and/or other relevant reading skills (Bowey, 1986; Bowey & Patel, 1988; Brimo, Apel, & Fountain, 2017; Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018; Cain, 2007; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Gaux & Gombert, 1999; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022; Gottardo, Mirza, Koh, Ferreira, & Javier, 2018; Hagtvet, 2003; Mackay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Mokhtri & Thompson, 2006; Nation & Snowling, 2000; Nippold, 2017; Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2019; Poulsen, Nielsen, & Vang Chrisensen, 2022; Scarborough, 1990; Scott, 2015; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007; Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021; Tong & McBride, 2015).
In other words, if all students did equally well on decoding, vocabulary, and memory tests, we’d still see variations in reading comprehension due to syntax differences. The kids who understand syntax comprehend better than the ones who don’t.
That list of studies is impressive, but not comprehensive. I didn’t search carefully for these studies – combing through reference lists, using a variety of search terms and strategies, considering books and doctoral dissertations, and so on.
It’s fair to point out that some studies didn’t find significant relationships between syntax and comprehension (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 2006), though the data are sufficiently one-sided to conclude that any honest meta-analysis would support the idea that knowledge of syntax is an essential reading skill.
Those studies cited above found sentence knowledge to be of value to comprehension as early as 30-months old and throughout the school grades, K-12. Syntax mattered with regular classroom kids and those with dyslexia. This pattern held in English, French, Dutch, and Cantonese. Syntax mattered with native English speakers and with English Language Learners. This was true in studies that measured syntax and comprehension simultaneously, and in longitudinal studies which considered the impact of syntax on learning.
The amount of comprehension variance explained by syntax varied quite a bit from study to study (~5% to 30%). Researchers attributed some of those differences to variations in the syntax measures.
Those analyses suggest that the ability to make sense of complex sentences is more crucial than the ability to evaluate grammatical accuracy (e.g., Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018). Researchers paid less attention to variations in reading comprehension measurement.
The texts included in comprehension tests can vary a great deal in sentence complexity, and in whether the questions they ask tap into this complexity (Shanahan & Kamil, 1984).
This matters since syntax is an important factor determining text complexity or comprehensibility (Graisser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; Stenner & Swartz, 2012). Texts with more complicated sentences are a challenge for kids who lag in sentence comprehension ability. However, at least for fifth graders the ability to make sense of sentences with simple structures was more closely related to reading comprehension than doing so with more difficult sentences; though perhaps due to the specific demands of the comprehension measure used in the study (Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021).
Another relevant collection of studies is those focused on oral reading fluency or text reading fluency. Such research has long shown that oral sentence reading requires skills beyond those required to read word lists – even when the words in the lists and sentences are identical (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003). Sentence reading did a better job than word list reading when it came to predicting reading comprehension. Students with comprehension problems do better with word lists than text reading fluency (Cutting, Matterek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009). Research also has reported that syntax and text prosody are related to each other and to reading comprehension (Veenendaal, Groen, & Vehoeven, 2015).
If that provocative but incomplete review of the research doesn’t convince you that sentence comprehension is a thing in reading, then I doubt that you can be convinced. Your lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society is safe.
For the more open minded, let’s turn to the teaching of sentence comprehension.
I wish there was an equally impressive array of studies showing that sentence comprehension instruction improves performance on state reading tests. I can’t do that.
A thoughtful review of relevant studies (MacKay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Stoddard, Valcante, Sindelar, O’Shea, & Algozzine, 1993) concluded that this research is so severely limited and insufficient that it would be unwise to proceed pedagogically. The reasoning of these researchers is consistent with what I usually espouse – don’t try to apply basic research to classroom practice. Wait for the instructional studies!
MacKay and company rightly point out that some interventions aimed at improving sentence comprehension haven’t worked (e.g., Balthazar & Scott, 2018), and that some of these interventions have been hopelessly confounded (e.g., Morris, et al., 2012; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2000; Reynolds, 2021). Several studies reported significant reading comprehension improvement, but they didn’t just teach syntax. This instruction also included attention to morphology, vocabulary, and/or text structure. The gains could have been due to any of those.
The same point could be made about paraphrasing studies (Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020). Paraphrase teaching usually includes some attention to translating sentences into one’s own words – but for the most part, these studies go beyond sentences to emphasize paragraph paraphrases.
Nevertheless, I would recommend sentence comprehension teaching.
First, studies that show a close connection between text reading fluency and reading comprehension are persuasive. I cited a few such studies above but could easily include many more; see Breznitz, 2005 for a more rigorous treatment of these issues. MacKay and her colleagues didn’t consider this work, but there are many studies in which oral reading guidance and chunking instruction improved reading comprehension (NICHD, 2000; Stevens, 1981). Teaching students how to read sentences aloud with proper prosody works, and I believe those practices to be clear examples of effective sentence instruction.
I know researchers, also, differ in the weight they accord to sentence manipulation instruction. I tend to be persuaded that sentence combining and reduction improves reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1985; O’Hare, 1973; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), and that provides another body of supportive instructional data – though the quality of some of these studies is admittedly dubious. The results appear to be equally strong in the best designed and implemented of these studies.
Finally, I identified a couple of other studies beyond the purview of the MacKay review. One of these taught 9- and 10-year-olds to read fables and to identify complex sentences, constituent clauses, and subordinate conjunctions in those texts, and to revise the fables to make them more readable. This resulted in significant gains in both oral and written language.
I also recently discovered a doctoral dissertation that evaluated the impact of an intriguing sentence comprehension intervention that improved reading achievement for high school students – grades 9 and 11 (Rozen, 2005). That study had teachers guiding students to analyze difficult texts sentence-by-sentence, discussing main ideas, author’s purpose, inferences, and styles of passage as expressed or revealed in those sentences. They also taught students to break down difficult sentences, simplifying them, and determining the primary function of the various phrases (e.g., who does what to whom?).
The comparison groups received all the business-as-usual reading instruction – including vocabulary, strategies, and practice reading of the texts. The 15-minutes per day of sentence work was accomplished by reducing the time accorded to those other skills. The classes were taught by the same teacher and students in the two groups read the same texts.
My advice to teachers?
1. Teach oral reading fluency with grade level classroom texts, including the texts for social studies and science. In the upper grades focus specifically on prosody issues. If the students are not reading the sentences properly – attending to punctuation and pausing in the appropriate places in terms of meaning, then the sentences will make no sense. I know of no research on this, but I wouldn’t hesitate to have students trying to read aloud various complex sentences that I pulled from the texts with which they are working.
2. I think it also makes sense to engage students in sentence combining and reduction – combining simple sentences to make complex ones and breaking more complicated sentences down into their constituent parts. For examples of this kind of work, along with a wealth of other practical syntax teaching approaches, I recommend downloading the document, “Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure” by Joan Sedita. I found it by typing ‘Syntactic Awareness” into the search box at the Mass Literacy Website (https://www.doe.mass.edu/massliteracy/)
3. Lots of times teachers tell me they aren’t too sure whether a sentence may prove to be complex for their students. A good readable source that can provide guidance for identifying sentences that may be barriers to comprehension can be found for free online; an article by Cheryl M. Scott and Catherine Balthazar provides great advice regarding sentence length, subordination, relative clauses, passive voice, and other syntactic issues. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373700/)
However, remember that even more basic sentences can pose challenges for elementary kids. No matter how complex a sentence may be, it is only worth breaking down if it poses an impediment to comprehension. Scott and Balthazar's guidance may help you to notice whether sentences pose particular kinds of problems (like a passive sentences that may lead to confusions of actors and what or whom is being acted upon). Exercises aimed at comprehending syntactic structures, should start with a question aimed at determining student understanding. If the students understood the sentence, there is nothing to teach. Move on. If the sentence is misunderstood, it is worth teaching.
4. That reading intervention described earlier – guiding students to read each sentence, to paraphrase them, and to break them down when the paraphrasing doesn’t go well – sounds great to me. That strikes me as a very intelligent and supportive approach to these skills – moving things along when the kids have no problem with a sentence and digging in to resolve the problem when they do.
5. Although I’ve emphasized sentences heavily here, it’s important to remember that individual words play an important role in sentence interpretation and syntactic understanding (Adlof & Catts, 2015; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022). Meaning often turns on coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) or subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Likewise, verb tenses (e.g., swim and swam) reveal when actions take place. Sentence work requires some attention to these kinds of word meanings.
6. Earlier I noted several successful reading interventions that have included sentence work. Those studies can’t prove the potency of sentence teaching, though including it didn’t prevent these instructional routines from being successful. As in those studies, I’d include sentence work along with lessons in vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and so on. These days vocabulary instruction seems to be getting a lot of play, though the contribution of syntax to reading comprehension is similar of magnitude (Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007).
References
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