Unlock Academic Writing One Sentence at a Time
A MiddleWeb Blog
Why teach academic language at the sentence level? While multilingual students gain social language typically within two years, abstract and highly structured academic language requires much more time, usually 5 to 7 years with explicit instruction (Cummins, 2021).
Many English language development teachers can feel overwhelmed by the task at hand.
In my forthcoming book with the renowned Beth Skelton, we will share an approach to teaching content and academic language at the same time. In this book written specifically for English development teachers, I advocate teaching at the sentence level because it can:
- facilitate understanding of content
- foster academic writing skills
While the book is for ELD teachers, I will share a content-based example so that teachers can see its application in other disciplines as well.
Facilitate understanding of content
Content can be dense. Going back to my recent MiddleWeb article on the Input-Output Loop, we can make content more accessible by breaking it up into more cognitively manageable units of details.
Having students try to remember too much information is taxing on their working memory. Therefore, I encourage teachers to teach a few details. Then have students process these details somehow. The somehow is by designing a processing question for these details.
For example, when teaching the unit on the Industrial Revolution, I want students to learn about how people worked and made things prior to the Industrial Revolution. After they have watched a short video or read an article about the cottage industry era, I provide this prompt: Describe how goods were produced during the cottage industry.
By answering this question after immediately learning about the cottage industry, students are able to pause to process the content. This brief pausing and engaging in the prompt has students work with the content instead of memorizing it. Actively processing content “in the moment” often results in students retaining more of the information. Once students have learned this part of the content, we move to the next and repeat the process: (1) teach a small collection of details, and (2) create a processing prompt.
Foster academic writing skills
Often, multilinguals just give us a correct one-word answer or a justifiable answer wrapped in an incomplete sentence. Frequently, we are so happy that their answers reveal correct comprehension that we move onto the next content. However, that is a missed opportunity for multilinguals to communicate like a scientist, a mathematician, an economist, a business person, or a historian. To seize this opportunity, we can supercharge our prompt by asking students to respond using academic language.
The structure that scaffolds academic writing at the sentence level is through sentence combining, which I learned from reading The Writing Rope. I’ve taken the concept of sentence combining and created this structure, which has been helpful to my students, especially beginners:
- Sentence 1: (write a question)
- Sentence 2: (write a question)
- Combine Sentences 1 and 2 together so that it follows a particular sentence structure.
For the cottage industry example, I structure it as follows:
- Sentence 1: How was work done during the cottage industry?
- Sentence 2: What was the result from doing work this way?
- Combine the sentences using the formula Sentence 1, so Sentence 2. You can adapt sentences as needed to follow the formula.
I change the color of the formula (see graphic above) so that it stands out and notifies students of the sentence structure they must use. There are many ways multilingual students can respond, which provides writing voice and creativity. Here is a worked example:
• Sentence 1: People worked in their homes to produce things by hand.
• Sentence 2: It costs a lot to buy products made by hand.
Combined sentence: People worked in their homes to produce things by hand, so it cost a lot to buy products made by hand because of the labor it took to make them by highly skilled artisans.
Notice how the combined sentence combined both sentences using the compound sentence structure that uses comma so. This sentence structure was intentionally picked because it showed the cause-effect relationship of manufacturing goods in the cottage industry.
Additionally, notice how Sentence 2 has even more details than the original one that was written. This is because the Sentence 1-2 part with individualized questions is like a draft. Students learn to actively revise their writing in the Combined Sentence section without having to change anything in the Sentence 1-2 section. We are indirectly teaching revision this way.
What sentence structures to teach
The main criterion for selecting a particular sentence structure is if it matches the content of the prompt. Since the prompt essentially requires students to show the cause-effect relationship of producing goods by hand, I selected the comma so sentence structure to facilitate this kind of thinking. I make this choice because, as Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, the highly respected authors of The Writing Revolution, have said: “Teaching students to write is teaching them to think” (2024, p. 5).
I would add that teaching students to write in academic ways is teaching them to think about content. In the comma so example about the cottage industry, I am having students think about the effect of producing things manually by skilled craftspeople. They need this understanding to see the impact of the momentous shift from manual labor to mass production during the Industrial Revolution.
I intentionally teach writing academic sentences as a tool for students to process content. The goal is not just to have students remember content to regurgitate it using the teacher’s words. Instead, the main goal when teaching multilinguals is to facilitate students’ thinking about content in a particular way communicated intentionally in a specific sentence structure.
Compound and complex sentences
I have two buckets of sentence structures to teach multilinguals to communicate in academic writing: compound sentences and complex sentences. To teach compound sentences, we are facilitating thinking about various details. When we use complex sentences, we are facilitating thinking about relationships and contradictions. While the following lists are not exhaustive, if multilinguals can intentionally and independently incorporate these in their writing and speech about content, they will be demonstrating high academic writing proficiency.
Compound sentences
- Sentence, and [To communicate additional details that are relevant]
- Sentence, but [To communicate contrasting details]
- Sentence, so sentence. [To communicate cause-effect relationships]
Complex sentences
- A: Although, After, According to, At the start of,
- W: When, While, Without
- E: Even though
- U: Unless, Until, Unfortunately for,
- B: Before, Because, Based on
- I: If, In addition to
- T: Though
- S: Since
Closing remarks
We are not just content teachers or ELD teachers. We are teachers of multilinguals, and our charge is to teach both content and how to communicate as educated, disciplined professionals do. I hope that through this process, you will have a practical method of teaching content, thinking, and academic language.
As I have experimented with the books mentioned in this article to create this method of instruction, I encourage you and your colleagues to experiment with my process. Make it your own and make it fit for your content and context. Regardless of the adjustments you make, I encourage you to keep processing content at the sentence level as a core part of your practice.
Resources
Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking the education of multilingual learners: a critical analysis of theoretical concepts. Multilingual Matters.
Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2024). The Writing Revolution 2.0. John Wiley & Sons.
Tan K. Huynh is the co-author (with Beth Skelton) of Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals (Corwin, 2023) and
