The Link Between Grammar Skills and Reading Comprehension
What comes to mind when you hear the word grammar? You may recall underlining subjects and predicates, diagramming sentences, and other common activities from elementary school English class.
We often relate grammar practice with the development of writing skills, but grammar plays an important role in reading comprehension too.
In this video, we will define grammar and explain the role it plays in reading comprehension. We will also describe some instructional practices used to teach grammar—and therefore assist reading comprehension—in students of different ages.
Reading: A Series of Building Blocks
Texts can be seen as a series of building blocks. Letters come together to form words, words come together to form sentences, and sentences come together to form paragraphs.
These components are not joined together randomly. Being familiar with the grammatical rules that govern these combinations helps readers with comprehension.
Grammar has multiple components. One component, syntax, refers to the ways words and phrases are combined to form sentences.
Progression of Syntax Skills
Young children learn that a complete sentence contains a subject and a predicate. They are introduced to the parts of speech that make up the subject and predicate: nouns and verbs.
Later, additional parts of speech are added, including pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, interjections, conjunctions, and prepositions.
After students learn to read and write simple sentences, they are introduced to compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.
Throughout this process, they learn that these words and phrases are combined in certain orders to form sentences correctly.
The Link Between Syntax and Reading Comprehension
Early readers are taught to use a variety of cueing systems to decode words and self-monitor their reading.
They are taught to ask themselves three questions:
- Does it look right?
- Does it sound right?
- Does it make sense?
Knowledge of grammar and syntax helps students answer the second question, “Does it sound right?”
Let’s see how this syntactic knowledge assists early readers with comprehension in a few different scenarios.
Kate
Kate is reading aloud from a book and comes to this sentence.
She begins reading.
“Sam play outside yesterday.”
She does not look all the way through the word played and omits the -ed ending. However, after reading the entire sentence, she stops.
She knows that the word yesterday means Sam played in the past. She knows that when something happens in the past, you put -ed at the end of most verbs. It doesn’t sound right to say, “Sam play outside yesterday.”
She goes back and rereads the sentence, correctly adding the -ed ending this time. Her knowledge of syntax has alerted her to an error in her reading, which she then self-corrects.
Marcus
Marcus is reading the following sentence:
He reads, “The girl car is on the road.”
Marcus stops. “Girl car” is not correct. In English, two nouns do not directly follow one another in this way. Marcus cannot verbalize this rule, but he knows it doesn’t sound right. He goes back and reads the sentence again, reading it correctly this time.
Reading words accurately is important in understanding the meaning of the text, which is known as comprehension. Knowledge of syntax alerts readers that something is not accurate and that they need to try again.
Syntax and Comprehension of Longer Sentences
Understanding how phrases and clauses join together helps readers determine the meanings of longer sentences too.
Look at the following sentence.
This compound-complex sentence is more challenging to comprehend. Knowledge of syntax helps readers understand how the components are joined together to make meaning. They know that the middle, independent clause “but before I go” indicates a condition that must first be met. The action in the end of the sentence, “cleaning the room,” must occur before the action in the first part of the sentence, “going to the movies.”
Analyzing the different parts of the sentence and their functions assists with comprehension.
Instructional Practices to Teach Grammar Skills
Students learn these building blocks of sentences in a variety of ways.
Constructing Sentences
Young students can learn about syntax by constructing sentences. Each word of a sentence can be written on a separate index card, and students can put the cards in order. As they read the cards in different orders and consider what sounds right, they will strengthen their knowledge of syntax.
Deconstructing Sentences
Students can break sentences into their component parts to analyze the different pieces, their functions, and the ways they are ordered.
For young students, this may involve separating a sentence into its complete subject and complete predicate.
After learning parts of speech, students can diagram sentences. In this exercise, they identify the parts of speech of each word and analyze the ways they are put together.
Older students may break a sentence down into different types of clauses and phrases. They may then look at the parts of speech of the words within each type of phrase or clause.
Reading Mentor Texts
Students can also identify the ways published authors combine words and phrases to make meaningful texts. They can be encouraged to experiment with the same types of sentences in their own writing.
Review
Let’s review what we have learned about grammar and its role in comprehension.
Grammar refers to the structure of a language. One component of grammar, syntax, refers to the ways words and phrases are combined to form sentences.
Knowledge of grammar and syntax assists with reading comprehension. Readers are able to determine if something doesn’t sound right, prompting them to reread and self-correct. They are also able to analyze individual words and phrases and the roles they play to identify the meanings of sentences.
There are many instructional practices that can be used to strengthen grammar skills. These include joining words together to form complete sentences, deconstructing sentences through diagramming, and analyzing examples of grammar in mentor texts.
Thanks for watching, and happy grammaring.