42 Sentence Starters
Samantha D'Amico
Strategy Overview
- Sentence starters give students the beginning part of a sentence and they fill in the rest.
- Sentence starters help to develop students’ oral language skills “by prompting students to discuss content with more complex structures and thinking…they also indirectly teach how content-specific language appears in context” (Colorín Colorado, 2024.)
- Sentence starters are especially beneficial to multilingual learners because they help the student to master English sentence structures which are often different from their first language. (Corujo, 2023).
Strategy in Action
One specific way this strategy can be used in the classroom is by asking students a “Question of the Day” (QOTD) during a morning meeting. Students would be given a sentence starter to share their answer to each question. Not only does the QOTD help with building classroom community, but also with student’s oral language skills.
Related Resources
- Sentence Stems – The Teacher Toolkit (contains video)
- Sentence Starters and Frames for MLs – A World of Language Learners
References
Corujo, J. (2023, August 15). Sentence frames for ell students. HMH. https://www.hmhco.com/blog/sentence-frames-for-ell-students
Rrittenhouse. (2024, August 30). Sentence frames and sentence starters. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/sentence-frames
