The Grammar We Actually Need: Why Syntax Matters — and How to Build It Without Drill and Kill

In eighth grade, I had a family friend with an English degree help me with grammar. We worked through helping verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been) set to a song so they would stick. I learned that prepositions are things you can do to a cloud: go above a cloud, under a cloud, around a cloud, after a cloud. I learned to diagram sentences. I could not keep adverbs and adjectives straight. The verb tenses turned me around completely (what is perfect about the perfect tense??).

I still know the helping verb song. Every one, in order.

What I could not do was read a complex sentence and understand how it was built — or write one with any confidence. The labels and the lists did not connect to anything real in my reading or my writing. Knowing that “quickly” was an adverb did not help me understand what it was doing in a sentence. The cloud trick for prepositions did not help me follow a paragraph that used them to link complicated ideas.

Somewhere along the way — through years of reading, through writing professionally, through working closely with language in curriculum and assessments — something shifted. I still cannot always explain why a complex sentence works. But I can recognize when one does not. And I can craft one when I need to.

That experience turns out to be exactly what the research would predict. And it tells us something important about how syntax — the way sentences are built — is actually learned, and what we should be doing to teach it.

Syntax Is Not Grammar Class. It Is How Meaning Works.

When most of us hear the word “grammar,” we picture what happened at that kitchen table — rules to memorize, parts of speech to label, sentences to diagram. I am willing to bet that most of you groaned a little just reading that. That kind of instruction has dominated language arts classrooms for generations. It feels rigorous. It produces testable knowledge. But the research on whether it actually improves reading comprehension or writing is not encouraging.

Timothy Shanahan, a respected voice in reading research, has been direct about this: no study has shown that teaching grammar rules in isolation actually improves how well students read or write. A relationship between grammar instruction and improved outcomes simply has not been established.

But here is what the same research does show clearly: syntax matters enormously for reading comprehension. The ability to understand how sentences are built — to follow the relationships between words, phrases, and ideas (the building blocks that sentences are made of) — is one of the most important and most overlooked parts of what it takes to comprehend a text.

Cheryl Scott, a researcher who has spent her career studying language and reading, made this case directly in a 2009 paper titled “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension.” She noted something striking: the word “sentence” does not appear anywhere in the National Reading Panel’s five pillars — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Yet sentences are the units through which all meaning in a text is carried. If a reader cannot follow individual sentences, they cannot understand the text — even if they can decode every word.

What Syntax Actually Does in a Sentence

Here is a simple demonstration. Read these two sentences:

The dog bit the man.

The man bit the dog.

Same words. Radically different meanings. The only thing that changes is word order — syntax. The structure of the sentence is what tells you who did what to whom.

Now try this one, the kind of sentence a child might encounter in a fourth-grade science textbook:

Although photosynthesis occurs primarily in the leaves, where chlorophyll absorbs sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose, some green stems are also capable of this process.

A child who can decode every word in that sentence can still completely misread it. The “although” sets up a contrast that has to be held in mind all the way to the end of the sentence. The “where” introduces a describing phrase that interrupts the main idea. The “some” at the end requires the reader to connect back to what was established at the beginning. If a child processes sentences word by word — without tracking how the parts relate — the sentence collapses into noise.

This is where many capable readers hit a wall, and it is not a phonics problem or a vocabulary problem. It is a syntax problem.

When Does the Wall Appear?

You may remember from last week’s article on oral language the concept of the fourth-grade slump — the shift from learning to read to reading to learn. Syntax is central to that shift.

In the early grades, texts are written in simple, short sentences close to the structures of everyday speech. The sentence “The cat sat on the mat” is easy to follow — it is short, direct, and built the way we talk. But academic language — the language of textbooks, essays, science writing, history — uses sentence structures that children rarely encounter in conversation. Long sentences built inside other sentences. Sentences where the action is hidden. Sentences where the subject is separated from its verb by a long phrase. Sentences where the most important information comes at the end rather than the beginning.

Children who have been immersed in complex language — through read-alouds, through wide reading, through rich conversation — have encountered these structures before. Their brains have begun to build the mental patterns for how sentences work that make reading them automatic. Children who arrive without that exposure encounter them for the first time in print, at exactly the moment when the content they are trying to understand has also gotten harder. For those children, the wall is not a reading failure. It is the predictable result of a gap that started long before they opened that textbook.

Syntax Is Caught, Not Taught

This is where my kitchen table experience becomes instructive — not because it failed, but because of what eventually worked.

The helping verb song did not teach me how to read complex sentences. Years of reading did. That is not a coincidence. The primary way children develop the ability to process and produce complex sentences is through exposure to complex language — in books, in conversations, in read-alouds, in the classroom talk of teachers who model sophisticated language.

This is one of the reasons the read aloud article and the oral language article in this series matter so much for syntax. Every time a child hears a complex sentence read aloud — every time they follow a long, winding sentence and understand how it lands — they are building the mental patterns that skilled reading requires. They are not learning rules. They are internalizing patterns.

Researcher Cheryl Scott describes syntax as “the workhorse of meaning” — not just the vehicle for expressing ideas, but the structure through which ideas are understood, organized, and acquired. When that vehicle is flawed, as she puts it, it will not transport the knowledge very well.

What Works — and What Does Not

So if traditional grammar instruction does not build the ability to follow and use complex sentences, what does?

The research points consistently toward working with sentences from real texts that students are reading or writing, rather than with invented examples in a grammar workbook. The pattern holds across every pillar of reading we have explored: skills taught in isolation, divorced from real language, do not transfer. Syntax is no different. Two approaches in particular have evidence behind them:

Sentence combining is exactly what it sounds like — taking two or more simple sentences and combining them into a single, more complex one. Developed in the 1960s and studied extensively since, sentence combining has been identified as one of the most effective writing instruction practices in research reviews (Graham & Perin, 2007). It does something isolated grammar instruction cannot: it requires students to actively manipulate sentence structure, which builds a feel for how sentences work — and that transfers to both writing and reading. A child who has practiced combining “The dog was hungry. The dog waited patiently.” into “Although the dog was hungry, he waited patiently” is learning something real about how clauses work — not by memorizing a rule, but by doing something with language.

Sentence deconstruction is a complementary approach that works in the opposite direction — taking a complex sentence from a text students are reading and breaking it into its component parts to uncover the meaning. Teachers who pull a challenging sentence from a history textbook and model, out loud, how to identify its parts and understand how they relate are doing syntax instruction in the most powerful possible context: the actual reading the student is trying to comprehend.

What both approaches share is that they treat syntax as a meaning-making tool rather than a labeling exercise. The goal is not to be able to label the parts. The goal is to understand what they are doing — what relationship they signal between the ideas on either side of them.

What Parents and Teachers Can Do

1. Read aloud — and read above their level

Every complex sentence a child hears in a well-crafted book is syntax instruction. The structures of written language are more complex than those of conversation, and hearing them — following them, making sense of them — builds sentence-reading ability. Reading aloud books slightly above a child’s independent reading level is one of the most effective things you can do for sentence understanding.

2. Notice interesting sentences

When you encounter a sentence — in a book, in a news article, on a sign — that is particularly well-built or particularly tricky, point it out. “Listen to how that sentence works.” “Why did the author put that part first?” Calling attention to sentence structure makes the invisible visible.

3. Try sentence combining at home

Give a child two short sentences and ask them to put them together into one. “The storm came quickly. We were not ready.” How many ways can they combine those? There is no single right answer — and the conversation about the options is where the learning lives.

4. For teachers: pull sentences from the texts you are teaching

Before assigning a complex reading, identify the two or three sentences most likely to cause comprehension problems. Model how you would break them apart and make sense of them. That ten minutes of sentence-level work before reading will pay off in the discussion that follows.

5. Prioritize wide reading

More than any single instructional technique, wide reading builds the ability to follow and use complex sentences. A child who reads extensively encounters the full range of sentence structures that academic language uses — and internalizes them through repeated exposure. There is no substitute.

The Bottom Line

Syntax is the structure through which meaning moves. A reader who cannot follow how complex sentences are built — who processes text word by word without tracking how the parts connect — will struggle to understand academic language no matter how strong their decoding or vocabulary skills are.

The grammar instruction most of us received — the songs, the diagrams, the labels — did not build that ability. The research is clear on this. What builds it is exposure to complex language through reading and being read to, and the kind of purposeful work with real sentences that treats them as tools for meaning rather than objects to label.

I still know the helping verb song. I just wish someone had also given me sentences worth taking apart.

Your Turn

Think back to how grammar was taught to you. Do you remember diagramming sentences, memorizing parts of speech, filling in worksheets? Did any of it feel connected to what you were reading or writing?

If you are a parent: when you read aloud to your child, do you ever stop and notice how a sentence is built? Has a sentence ever surprised or tripped you up — and did you talk about it?

If you are a teacher: what does grammar instruction look like in your classroom right now? Have you tried sentence combining or sentence deconstruction? What has worked?

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