Sentence Writing Intervention for At‐Risk Writers in Upper Elementary Grades

Abstract

Fluent production of a variety of grammatically correct sentences is essential to overall writing quality across genres. Sentence-production skills become increasingly important as students prepare to transition from the elementary grades to middle-school. Many students in the upperelementary grades, however, struggle with sentence production skills-especially writers with a learning disability. This paper provides useful information for educators focusing on improving the quality of sentence-level writing skills for students with learning disabilities in Grades 3-5. Specifically, guidance is provided for using (a) assessment to inform sentence-level intervention and (b) a sequence of instructional practices for improving foundational sentence-level production skills. SENTENCE WRITING INTERVENTION FOR AT-RISK WRITERS IN UPPER ELEMENTARY GRADESSentence-level writing skills are essential to overall writing quality, yet many students struggle with the fluent production of a variety of sentences-especially students with Learning Disabilities (LD) and/or culturally and linguistically diverse students (Graham et al., 2017;Graham et al., 2018;Shanahan, 2006). Research on and resources for teaching sentence-level writing skills are scarce in comparison to those for word-level (i.e., handwriting, spelling) and passage-level writing skills (Graham et al., 2018). In our experience with upper elementary teachers working with diverse struggling writers, we have often heard teachers lament about the general lack of resources for students who struggle specifically with sentence-level writing skills. Often, teachers will resort to worksheets and classic grammar instructional techniques like sentence diagramming, techniques that are generally not grounded in evidence (Campbell et al., 1991;Collins & Norris, 2017). Thus, this article was written to provide readers with information about empirically-sound instructional procedures that can be immediately integrated

High–Quality Formative Writing Assessment for Middle School Students in Tier 2 Literacy Interventions

“…We distinguish Tier 2 from Tier 3 interventions based on the degree of writing difficulty exhibited by students in the middle grades. For example, we would consider a Tier 3 intervention to be for adolescents who are still working on basic sentence construction or who have a handwriting disability (Smith et al., 2021). By contrast, the Tier 2 intervention of interest to the work presented here would be more appropriate for students who need targeted instruction in the features of paragraph and multiparagraph writing that are common parts of content‐area learning (e.g., Wissinger & De La Paz, 2020).…”

A literature synthesis of curriculum‐based measurement in writing for English learners

“…Furthermore, some patterns of mistakes in English made by ELs may be associated to their native language and language acquisition as opposed to being an indicator of potential disability (e.g., a Spanish speaker spelling 'me' in English as 'mi' due to the long 'e' sound of 'i' in written Spanish). As such, while an overall score on CBM-W is useful, EL writing requires error analysis to determine the meaning and significance of that score and to inform responsive instruction (Smith et al, 2021).…”