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Breaking one complex sentence down into small parts enhances students' awareness of vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure.

Mikhail Seleznev / iStock

As middle and high school students engage with complex texts, their diverse reading skills become increasingly apparent. I have found it challenging and time-consuming to scaffold comprehension for students who struggle while also deepening understanding for students who are ready for more. One concrete strategy is to have students analyze juicy sentences. These can be implemented with any course content to support students who are struggling readers and writers, and it can also be differentiated for students' varying literacy skills.

Juicy sentences, a term used by Charles and Lily Wong Filmore, describes rich, complex, meaning-packed sentences that students closely examine with teacher guidance. I have found that this language-based approach, first developed to support English language learners, enriches my students' vocabulary, syntax, and structure awareness. A well-chosen juicy sentence will support comprehension through structured text analysis and engaging discussion. This same sentence can become a mentor sentence to develop students' writing skills.

Juicy Sentences in High School English

In my 10th-grade English class, we begin the year by studying the craft of storytelling. One of our first stories is "A Rose for Emily," by William Faulkner. We are interested in analyzing Miss Emily as a character in part by what others say about her. For example, the narrator writes, "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town..." This is a great juicy sentence-it relates to our content focus (characterization in storytelling) and contains interesting syntax and structure with rich vocabulary.

Whole: Students discuss their initial understanding of the meaning of the juicy sentence.

Part: Chunk the sentence into phrases and analyze the chunks through questioning. Consider having students write the sentence on a sentence strip, cut it into chunks, and then rearrange the chunks to see if the sentence still makes sense. They can also discuss how rearranging it may change the meaning. Students can also focus on specific words in the sentence to attend to vocabulary and word choice.

Whole: This second discussion focuses on deeper comprehension of the whole sentence after the part-level analysis, and it can also extend to how the sentence contributes to the unit's content or guiding questions.

Practice: Provide students with an opportunity to express their deeper comprehension in writing and practice their writing craft by mimicking the structure and/or syntax of the juicy sentence.

I guide my students through a juicy sentence protocol (similar to this one), a whole-part-whole-practice structured approach:

Putting the Protocol into Action

Here's how the protocol looks for my 10th graders studying characterization.

Consider echo reading or choral reading the sentence to support students' fluency.

Ask students, "Do you see any words that are unfamiliar or interesting?" Circle these words.

Turn and talk: "What do you think this sentence means? What do you learn about Miss Emily's character?"

Whole: Initial comprehension. Model reading the sentence aloud. "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town..."

Part: Chunk the sentence into phrases. Write the sentence on a sentence strip and cut it into chunks. The sentence may look like this: Alive // Miss Emily had been a tradition // a duty // and a care; // a sort of hereditary obligation // upon the town...

What do you think is the main clause of the sentence? (Miss Emily had been a tradition.)

How do the other chunks enhance the main clause?

Can we rearrange the chunks so the sentence still makes sense?

How does rearranging the sentence affect the meaning?

Ask your students these questions:

What does the word tradition mean? (Customs passed down from generation to generation.)

What is the effect of using the word tradition to describe a person?

What does the word duty mean? (Responsibility.)

Let's look at the phrase hereditary obligation. Which previously used word does hereditary connect most closely with? (Tradition.) How about obligation? (Duty.)

Part: Vocabulary and word choice. Consider using a word map graphic organizer to visualize the word study. Discuss as a class:

Based on our study of these phrases and words, what do we learn about the relationship between Miss Emily and the town from this sentence?

What more do we learn about Miss Emily's character?

How does the author's sentence structure enhance our understanding of Miss Emily as a character?

How does the author's syntax (word order and word choice) develop characterization?

Whole: Deeper comprehension and connecting to the unit. How does the sentence help us understand the text?

Paraphrase the sentence and maintain the same meaning about Miss Emily's character.

Use what you have learned about structure and syntax to write an original sentence about Miss Emily's character.

Writing practice: Choose one of these options to practice your writing craft.

Juicy Sentences Beyond ELA

Juicy sentences are great for closer reading and comprehension of any content area text. Literacy skills have become intertwined with the content in every subject area. Students need to read, comprehend, and write to demonstrate reasoning, analysis, and understanding in all subject areas. The juicy sentence whole-part-whole approach provides a structure for guiding students to understand the important subject-area learning while attending to literacy skills.

Here are some other examples of a juicy sentence protocol that I've written to support middle school science and English language arts (ELA), as well as high school social studies.

As texts become increasingly complex in middle and high school, students need explicit and direct instruction on how written language works. Teachers can use this simple whole-part-whole-practice routine with their content area texts to build students' vocabulary, support students' comprehension, and develop writing skills.

When my students and I work with juicy sentences, I think of the saying, "Go slow to go fast!" When we slow down for a deep dive into language, students build a base of language knowledge that, over time, supports their reading comprehension and writing skills.

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Breaking one complex sentence down into small parts enhances students' awareness of vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure.

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