Why Syntax Matters (Even for Kindergarteners)
Syntax isn’t just for older students! Research shows that even five-year-olds produce subordinate and coordinate clauses.
A 2024 study by Owens, Pavelko, and Hahs-Vaughn analyzed conversational samples from 196 children ages 5 to 10 years, 11 months.
Five-year-olds used an average of 1.25 subordinate clauses and 2.05 coordinate clauses, and that number increased steadily with age.
If your students are only producing simple sentences, they may need support with syntax. Limited syntax can affect comprehension, writing, and overall language performance.
Owens (2016) found that about half of five-year-olds understand reversible passive sentences (e.g., “The dog was chased by the cat”), and by age 8, 90% can comprehend them.
This means that targeting syntax — even with kindergarteners — helps build comprehension and expressive language skills that impact reading and writing success.
👉 Prefer to listen? Check out the full podcast episode above for a quick blitz through all five strategies.
Step 1: Start With a Thorough Syntax Assessment
Syntax varies across contexts, so assessment should too. Guo & Schneider (2016) demonstrated that tense and grammaticality measures from narrative tasks can help differentiate students with and without language impairments. Nippold et al. (2005) also found that children use more complex syntax in expository tasks than in conversation.
Here’s how to assess syntax comprehensively:
– Collect multiple language samples (e.g., conversational, narrative, persuasive, and expository).
– Observe in the classroom to capture naturalistic syntax use.
– Review writing samples to see syntax in an academic context.
– Include structured assessments targeting comprehension and production.
– Gather teacher and parent input to identify functional impacts.
💡 SLP Now Tip: Use our Language Sample Analysis Tools to streamline your syntax assessments.
Step 2: Make Syntax Explicit, Then Contextualize It
Explicit teaching sets the stage for understanding.
According to Zipoli (2017), lessons should begin with a clear explanation of the sentence structure and its purpose, followed by modeling and guided practice.
Best practices for explicit syntax instruction:
– Use clear, concise, and consistent explanations.
– Provide multiple examples with visual and auditory cues (color coding, sentence frames, etc.).
– Gradually fade supports as students gain independence.
Once students understand the structure, transition to contextualized practice. As Ukrainetz (2015) emphasizes, students learn syntax best when it’s embedded in meaningful activities like narratives, classroom discussions, or writing tasks.
💡 Try This: Incorporate syntax instruction into your literacy-based therapy sessions using storybooks or nonfiction passages that naturally include target structures. SLP Now has therapy plans to make this super easy to implement!
Step 3: Evidence-Based Syntax Intervention Strategies
Let’s look at a few proven techniques you can implement right away.
1. Focused Stimulation
Provide frequent models and recasts in natural conversation.
Student: “The boy ran.”
SLP: “Yes! The boy ran after the dog that escaped.”
This implicit modeling approach exposes students to variability, which strengthens learning (Plante et al., 2014).
2. Directed Questioning
Use scaffolded questions to build comprehension of complex structures, like the passive voice:
Sentence: “Diego was found by Rebecca.”
Ask: “Who was found?” “Who did the finding?”
Pair this with pictorial supports to make abstract syntax more concrete.
3. Visual Supports and Picture Sequencing
Visuals clarify sentence meaning. In SLP Now, you’ll find syntax visuals, icon cards, and structured activities for passive voice, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses.
Try using picture sequencing to teach adverbial clauses:
“Before I take the test, I will study.”
Students can arrange icons representing each clause to show temporal order.
4. Sentence Combining
Help students merge simple sentences into complex ones to develop flexibility:
“The dog barked. The mailman came.” → “The dog barked when the mailman came.”
Use conjunction cards or sentence starters to scaffold learning.
5. Sentence Decomposition
Break down complex sentences to promote comprehension:
“The dog that barked at the mailman ran away.” → “The dog barked at the mailman. The dog ran away.”
This strategy pairs well with sentence combining to support both understanding and production.
Step 4: Embed Syntax in Meaningful Contexts
Syntax intervention works best when it’s functional and engaging. Move beyond isolated drills and integrate targets into authentic communication: storytelling, retelling, explaining science experiments, or writing persuasive paragraphs.
SLP Now’s literacy-based therapy units are designed for exactly this, giving you ready-made materials that embed syntax goals into real contexts. You can model and recast complex sentences, scaffold comprehension with visuals, and collect data effortlessly.
Bringing It All Together
Syntax development is a critical skill for every school-age student. By assessing across contexts, teaching explicitly, and applying evidence-based strategies, you can help students grow from simple sentence users to confident communicators.
If you’re ready to simplify syntax intervention, explore the SLP Now Membership for therapy materials, sentence-level visuals, and built-in supports for your literacy-based lessons.
References
Guo, L.-Y. & Schneider, P. (2016). Differentiating School-Aged Children With and Without Language Impairment Using Tense and Grammaticality Measures From a Narrative Task. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Nippold, M. A., Hesketh, L. J., Duthie, J. K., & Mansfield, T. C. (2005). Conversational versus expository discourse: A study of syntactic development in children, adolescents, and adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48(5), 1048–1064.
Owens, R. E., Jr., Pavelko, S. L., & Hahs-Vaughn, D. (2024). Growth of complex syntax: Coordinate and subordinate clause use in elementary school–aged children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Plante, E., Ogilvie, T., Vance, R., Aguilar, J. M., Dailey, N. S., Meyers, C., … Burton, R. (2014). Variability in the language input to children enhances learning in a treatment context. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Ukrainetz, T. A. (2006). Contextualized language intervention: Scaffolding preK-12 literacy achievement. Austin, TX: PRO-ED, Inc.
Ukrainetz, T. A. (2015). School-age language intervention: Evidence-based practices. Austin, TX: PRO-ED, Inc.
Zipoli, R. P. (2017). Unraveling difficult sentences: Strategies to support reading comprehension. Intervention in School and Clinic, 52, 218–227.
Transcript
Hello there, and I hope you are in the mood for some talk about syntax. Last week, we talked about compound sentences and I wanted to continue the conversation with more types of syntax, like passive voice and relative clauses. Before you hit pause because you're like, well, I work with kindergartners or I work with second grade,this is still a relevant thing to target with our students. There was a study by Owens et al in 2024. They reviewed conversational language samples for 196 children, ages five to 10 years, 11 months, They found that five year olds are using an average of 1.25 subordinate clauses and 2.05 coordinate clauses, so even five year olds are using complex syntax and the number continues to increase with age. So if we are seeing our students only use simple sentences, that is a sign that they may need support with syntax and we might want to look into it a little bit for further. It's easy to hear if they're using simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and all types of clauses.
If we're not seeing this in their communication, they may be struggling to comprehend that complex syntax as well. And that is an absolutely age appropriate skill for our school age students. Approximately half of five year olds are able to comprehend reversible passive sentences, and that's from Owen's 2016.
And 90% of children between the ages of seven and a half and eight are able to comprehend reversible passives. So very early on in the school age years, this is something that's typical and something that we might want to support if our students are struggling with it.
So hopefully you're still intrigued. I am going to be sharing strategies that we can use in our assessment and intervention when targeting these types of goals. The first strategy, and this has been a common theme, but we want to start with a thorough assessment. Collect language samples and consider multiple contexts because we use different types of syntax when generating narratives, retelling narratives, describing a picture, summarizing a text, explaining how to do something, trying to persuade someone.
So all of those types of samples will elicit different syntax. We want to consider different language samples. We will also want to observe in the classroom because the language that we're hearing in the classroom will be a little bit different. We can look at work samples and look at their writing.
And we can also collect parent and teacher report. And then we can also do a more structured assessment of the comprehension and production of syntax.
In terms of actual treatment strategies, I'm pulling a lot of these from Zipoli 2017. I'll share the citation in the show notes. Lessons should begin with clear explanations of the target sentence structure and give the purpose of the lesson so we can model comprehension and production of sentence structures. We'll want to use clear, concise, and consistent language as we're doing that.
When we're providing demonstrations, we'll give multiple examples and use visual and auditory cues to make the syntactic features more explicit. There's a lot we can do to support the teaching of that. One strategy is focused stimulation.
This is one that applies to all grammar goals and that I have found to be incredibly impactful. This is a little bit more implicit, but this is when we provide frequent models and recasts in a variety of activities. So, when we're modeling the passive voice or a relative clause, we highlight that naturally in conversation. When we recast, we might correct what the child says or modify it. If they produce a simple sentence in our literacy based therapy activity, I can recast the student's sentence and add in that relative class.
Using those models and recasts is what they call focused stimulation in the research and we can incorporate that in all of our therapy activities. That is a great way to implicitly target some of these skills.
Other strategies we might use for passive voice are using directed questions to enhance and scaffold comprehension. So if we have a sentence like Diego was found by Rebecca. We can say who was found and who did the finding, and ask some questions about that statement.
And we can use pictorial support as well and asking students to draw pictures to represent those sentences. The example I gave was with the passive, but we can also do this with a active voice. So instead of Diego was found by Rebecca, we can do Diego found Rebecca. And in SLP Now we have syntax activities attached to the majority of our literacy based units. We embed these strategies in the activities for passive voice, for example. So we have a sentence, with pictures and visual choices to help the students.
We have pictorial support as well, and we give you statements and questions so that you have support as you're implementing these types of strategies. For verbal clauses, which is another type of syntax we might want to target, we can use sentence starters.
This is an effective technique for helping students understand and write more elaborate sentences. If we give them a starter, they can fill in the sentence and create more. We also have picture sequencing. If we have pictures of the different items, for example, before I take the test, I will study. You can have a icon representing studying and taking the test, and you can do that practice using those adverbial clauses. In SLP Now we have icon cards for the conjunctions that you would use with the sentence starters.
We also have pictures to practice and support that understanding. We give you tools for sentence starters and picture sequencing. In terms of relative clauses, two more evidence backed strategies are to use sentence combining, which we talked about last week.
This is where we're combining two or more simple sentences. You can use simple sentences from whatever book or article you're reading and then use our conjunction cards to help students combine those. The other strategy we talked about last week is sentence decomposition, where you take a complex sentence and break it down into simpler sentences.
All you need is the book or article you're reading and identifying those simple, complex, and compound sentences. That is a quick blitz of some strategies we can use for our syntax goals. Check out the show notes for references and more detail about the resources if you want help implementing this.
I hope that this was a helpful review for you and we'll see you in the next one.
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