The importance of teaching Syntax to kids

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Does this sound like your kid?


  • Reading comprehension isn’t improving.
  • Can’t answer inference questions, although they have worked on it. 
  • Facing trouble with re-tell sentences.   
  • Written language and essays are full of grammatical errors and sentences don’t make sense. 
  • Can’t follow directions in class.
  • Unsure of processing difficulties. 


Do you know, what’s the common problem in this?

The Syntax.

Let us explain to you why it is important to teach syntax to your kids.  

What is Syntax?

Syntax is a linguist’s word for sentence structure. It is a rule system that governs

how words and phrases are arranged into clauses and sentences. 

What is Syntactic Awareness?

Syntactic Awareness is the ability to monitor relationships among the words in the sentence to understand while reading or composing orally or in writing. Kids can build syntactic awareness through exposure to oral and written language through independent reading or when read aloud by their parents.    

Why teach syntax to kids?

Learning syntax and sentence structure helps kids convey and clarify the meaning of their sentences. Research studies have shown that there is a relationship between an individual’s syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. As kids learn to frame and use more complex sentences in their oral and written communication, their ability to make sense of what they read also increases. 

Activities to develop your child’s syntactic awareness

Sentence Scramble

During a sentence scramble activity, your child can arrange words to form a sentence. In this activity, your child can be given a set of words from a sentence that is out of order. He/She must arrange the words in a complete sentence according to correct English grammar. Here are two

examples:

all yellow chicks Not are Not all chicks are yellow. kind a She girl is She is a kind girl.  


Sentence Elaboration: The ‘W’ question

Sentence elaboration activities help students use and manipulate a growing number of sentences. This is usually helpful for developing syntactic awareness for subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases and adverbial phrases. The sentence elaboration activity uses 6 question words: who, what, where, why, which and how. 


The activity starts with a simple subject. Eg: turtle. Then a series of questions can be asked to prompt students to expand and elaborate.


Here are a few examples:

Who? The turtle

What about her? The young turtle swam.

Where did she swim? The young turtle swam in the ocean. 


Good News!

Working on different types of problem sentences not only improves the sentence production but also improves your child’s reading abilities.  

We at Little Genius, are experts!

If your child cannot understand the types of complex sentences that are often encountered in academic texts, Little Genius can help. We are one of the leading online grammar classes for kids. To get your child enrolled, check our website https://littlegeniusacademy.co.in/

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