---

Building sentences and grammar

By building and reading sentences teenagers are building their language knowledge.

• Reading simple sentences, at or just beyond the teenagers' level of comprehension for spoken language, will teach them to understand grammar that they are also learning from listening to spoken language.
• Written words do not 'disappear' like spoken ones do, and teenagers are helped to be aware of and remember words and part of words. They have more time to think about the words and to develop their understanding of words and sentences through illustrations and comprehension activities.
• Reading grammatically correct sentences enables teenagers to practise speaking in grammatically correct sentences they could not construct themselves at that stage in their speech and language development, even though they may understand the constructions. Where they do not understand the construction they are reading, they can be taught to do so with comprehension activities.
• Saying longer sentences does not only help language learning - it also helps teenagers to speak and use their language knowledge to communicate more effectively. They do not have to think of the words or the order of the words they want to use when they are reading - these are already provided for them, so they can focus on saying the words and learning the pattern of words in the sentence. The effect of this on self-esteem can be dramatic for teenagers, who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, know that they are saying and using language that sounds like the language used by others.
• Where teenagers have some understanding of phonics, the letters in words also help them to say the words more clearly. In turn, reading the words in the sentence will help them to develop phonic skills and increase their phonological awareness.

Developing writing skills alongside reading

When teenagers can read words in a sentence, they can also write the sentence, by ordering the words. To begin with, this will be by copying, for sentences they have been taught, or short sentences they have memorised from their individual reading books. They can also match whole or parts of a sentence to the whole sentence.

When teenagers have learned a bank of words that includes function words and words that they will need to produce grammatically correct sentences, in writing or speaking, they can create their own sentences by joining word cards together or using appropriate computer software, such as Inclusive Writer.^[28]

Choosing grammatical structures and teaching understanding

The best guide for developing the sentences for teenagers to read and write that will help them to learn grammar, is to write in simple sentences about everyday life. More complex sentences can be written for more language able teenagers. Individual books about teenagers' life at home and at school are good starting points for young people. Who are their family members? What do people do? What happens to them during the day? Use holiday and school photographs and write simple grammatical sentences to accompany these everyday activities and ideas. Do not oversimplify the sentences - do use the grammatically correct forms that you would use when speaking to any other person. This will introduce parts of grammar the teenager needs to learn, quite naturally, for example, tense words, negatives, pronouns, question and answer forms. Teenagers can say what it is they want to tell you about an event, picture or story, and you can write an appropriate, expanded, grammatically correct short sentence to go with a picture.

For example:

• Teenager says ''Mum''. You write ''This is my Mum''.
• Teenager says ''Dad''. You write ''This is my Dad''.
• Using tenses:
• Teenager says ''Go football''. You write ''We are going to see the football match.''
• Teenager says ''Went shops, buy crisps''. You write ''I went to the shops. I bought a bag of crisps''.

As teenagers' language knowledge and speech develops, and their reading and writing skills increase, these sentences will be developed further with more complex forms, such as conjunctions (''and'', ''because'', ''but''), question forms and answers (''Why is the girl laughing?... Because...''), and embedded sentences. These are described in the Speech and Language Overview and DSra grammar checklists^[DSra-04-01] in this series. Many aspects of language may be represented in even a few sentences in a short text (Figure 10).

Sentences for communication

All the time that everyday language is written down, read back, applied to real situations, classroom work and events, and teenagers are encouraged to create their own sentences, language comprehension is being taught and learned.

Sentences written in the first person, about the teenager's frequent, real life events have the added advantage of modelling phrases and sentences that the teenager wants to use to communicate with others. Reading communicative phrases can be particularly useful for teenagers who can read but lack social confidence or communication skills, for example ''What's your name?'' ''My name is (first and second names), or ''Where do you live?'', ''I live at ....''. Examples of language for conversation skills are included in the DSra Interactive communication checklist.^[DSra-03-01]

Schools and families can work together to write sentences for what has happened at the weekend or at school and practice them in a conversation diary - that is, writing down the sentences the teenager would use to tell what has happened.

A written sentence can help to rehearse information for a situation that may otherwise be difficult, for example, answering the register, giving messages around school, answering the telephone or asking for goods from a shop.

At school, sentences can be built during class activities shared with the whole class. This is one of the most important tasks for differentiating the curriculum for pupils. The language used may need some shortening and simplification, particularly if the teenager is going to write the sentence as well as read it - by matching word cards, tracing over, copywriting underneath or copying onto a separate piece of paper.

The authors recommend that sentences be built by using the language spoken to teenagers, language for the ideas that the teenager wants to express, the language of the classroom, social and curricular, and the language that relates to the teenager's interests, cultural and family life. This will help to develop useful language skills and vocabulary that will be heard and practised often. It also makes the task of choosing sentences easier and within the ability of everyone working with and supporting the young person (Figure 11).

Grammar checklists

Grammar learning checklists and guides can be used to check that important aspects of language learning are being taught and learned. Guidance for this can be provided by each young person's speech and language therapist. For example, targeting the teaching of the pronouns ''he'', ''she'', ''his'', ''her'', past and future tense verbs, more advanced prepositions (e.g., ''above'', ''below''), question and answer forms and comparatives.

However, the people who are spending time talking and interacting with teenagers every day (parents and teachers) are in a far better position to teach language and grammar than the teenager's speech and language therapist. The authors wish to reassure parents and teachers that it is quite difficult to go wrong when creating sentences for teenagers to develop their language through reading, if you use the simple, grammatically correct sentences that are used in everyday language.

Teaching understanding of words and sentences

New vocabulary is introduced naturally in conversation, literacy teaching and in project work across the curriculum, at home and in the classroom. Teenagers will be introduced to new grammar and vocabulary through reading books, and similarly these will teach and model speech and language skills.

Pictures help to teach language comprehension, and can be combined with sentences to ensure that understanding is illustrated or emphasised.

To help teenagers to demonstrate their understanding, especially before they are able to speak or write well enough to convey their understanding, activities can be created or worksheets used in a variety of ways. Some of these are listed in the 'Tips for preparing worksheets' box, reproduced from Accessing the Curriculum - Strategies for differentiation for pupils with Down syndrome. These methods can also be used to monitor progress and to help children participate in assessment and test activities.

Some published reading and writing schemes have accompanying work books that teach and test comprehension at the sentence and text levels.