What is a Sentence?

Before you can punctuate correctly, you have to know what a sentence is. Here are some multimodal activities to help learners get familiar with that basic unit of thought.

Separate the Sentences

In pairs, have learners read a piece of text together sentence-by-sentence with one learner reading the first sentence, and the other learner reading the next one, taking it in turns. This requires learners to pay attention to the periods and lets them hear each sentence as a unit. The text must be at a very comfortable reading level for the learners. If you are working one-to-one, do this activity with the learner. It looks like (and it is) a reading exercise, but it also fosters an awareness of the sentence as a unit of thought.

The “Pop-In”

To focus on the sentence as something that is a complete thought, I model a “pop-in.” I go out of the room, close the door behind me, then pop in, say a sentence or a fragment, and pop out again. For example, I’ll open the door and say, “When you’re finished the exercise,” then close the door. Next, I come back in and ask people if what I said was a complete thought. Did they get a message, or are they confused about what I meant? Would it need a period, or would it need to be joined to some other words? There is something about the opening and closing of the door that isolates the words and makes them easier to examine.

Then I ask individual learners to pop in with their own set of words, and we figure out if it is a sentence or not.

You could use a door or a screen to pop in from, or simply stand up, say the words, and sit down again.