1. Even young students are expected to:

• ask questions, orally recount events, outline procedures, retell stories, describe and compare objects, explain how things work or why things happened, and to discuss, negotiate, and converse with others; and

• write descriptions, reports, narratives, and opinion pieces.

2. It’s much easier to do these tasks well if you can connect your ideas, e.g., by saying and writing:

• compound sentences featuring conjunctions like “and”, “or”, “but” and “so”;

• complex sentences featuring conjunctions like “if”, “because”, “before”, “after”, “while”, “until”, and “unless”;  and

• sentences featuring relative clauses starting with words like “who”, “that” and “which”.

3. Most typically-developing children start to experiment with complex syntax, orally, at around 2-3 years of age. But many don’t, including lots of children with language and learning disorders. Some students start school with limited exposure to complex syntax in books and/or in the language of instruction at school.

4. To support thinking and language development, all students should be taught - explicitly - to write a variety of sentence structures featuring complex syntax. This can be done by teaching students to:

• combine simple sentences to form more complex sentences using a variety of conjunctions; 

• imitate good models, e.g. through dictation and transcription practice;

• understand structural features of language using visuals (e.g. shape blocks, arrows, colours) and scaffolds;

• expand simple sentences, e.g. by answering “who”, “what happened”, “when”, “where”, “how”, and “why” questions; and

• formulate sentences from sentence fragments, again using a range of conjunctions.

For more detail, examples, and further reading suggestions, read our article at bit.ly/complexsyntax