Engagement Strategies - Complete Sentences

 Overview

  Use in the Classroom

Before we can expect students to give clear, full sentence responses, teachers need to model a complete sentence and provide sentence starters. The question must elicit a full sentence response and may follow a short answer question. Prior to calling on an individual student to respond, teach, ask a question specific to what has been taught, then:

• provide a sentence starter.
• pause and/or pair-share, thus providing students with thinking time and an opportunity to practise articulating the response prior to being called on to ‘stand and deliver’. 
• select a non-volunteer to articulate the answer, provide effective feedback.
• may ask the whole class to chorally repeat the complete sentence. 

Example:

  Personalised Learning

When students with additional needs are engaging with learning by giving full sentence answers to questions, there can be some potential barriers that need to be considered.

These may include the articulation of speech, the complexities of oral syntax and vocabulary knowledge and recall. Some students may have an increase in anxiety when speaking aloud in front of their peers.

Some potential adjustments may include:

• Model example and non-example responses and teach any content words to be used in the sentence. This may include visuals of key words.
• Teach the student how to take the words in the question and use them to begin their complete sentence response.
• Allow additional processing time or encourage practice with a partner before responding and giving a complete sentence independently.
• If the student uses fragmented syntax, model complete syntax back to them. This may include using five fingers or blocks as a visual to count out the number of words to be used to make up a complete sentence and to show that sentences are made up of several words.
• Provide sentence starters and prompts or sentences where the student can fill in a word and then repeat the whole sentence with the teacher.
• Use of a communication device such as a voice output or a communication aid whereby the student records the sentence and plays it aloud for the whole class.
• Use of sentence strips to re-arrange words into a complete sentence or provide several sentences and the student chooses the complete one.
• Allow choral responses in pairs or small groups to articulate the complete sentence or the teacher types the complete sentences provided by other students and the student reads back the sentences.

  Resources