English Sentence Building

This section of the English Raven website contains guides and ready-to-use supplements to assist teachers in promoting structural development and sentence writing skills in their young learner students. The underlying principles associated with the Sentence Builder approach are that Young Learners do have the potential to learn English structure in a methodical fashion, and they can enjoy doing so if lessons of this nature are presented to them in an ongoing and non-intensive way. Grammatical accuracy is essentially about particular patterns and combinations, and sorting it out for the first time is very much like solving a puzzle. It is hoped that this approach does just that - presents English language to young students as a series of challenging puzzles they must somehow figure out.

It is important to note that these lessons are not intended as "presentation activities". That is, they are best suited to the practice, review or consolidation segments of given lessons, and should follow up an oral approach to introducing the language in a communicative way. Focusing too much or entirely on these kinds of "paper-based" activities could be detrimental for the students in terms of their ability to apply the language orally.

The lessons are also designed to encourage independent application and learning strategies in the students. It is important to encourage the students to self-correct, and the various navigation techniques allow the students to apply independently and then have the teacher indicate whether their sentence constructions are correct before going on to writing sentences out. If you are trying this kind of approach out for the first time, you may be surprised. Students tend to become very absorbed in the worksheets, and very rarely think they are actually studying that dreaded word "grammar"!

Here you will find a detailed teacher's guide to making and applying sentence building worksheets yourself, as well as a series of templates and ready-to-go worksheets. Sentence Navigator represents 4 complete pre-made books that apply a variety of sentence building techniques across 32 lessons and almost 300 pages of material.