Targeting Syntactic Language Skills in the Literacy-Based Therapy Framework

After working on activities that focus on vocabulary and semantic skills, you can target syntactic and grammatical skills.

Book selection is important here, since you will want to look for examples of the target skill in the text.

Syntactic & grammatical skills may include:

• Verb tense

• Auxiliary verbs

• Plural nouns

• Compound sentences

• Complex sentences

🌟 Here are three ideas for targeting morpho-syntactic skills within the literacy-based therapy framework:

1️⃣ Look for and read examples of the target sentences in the book with the student.

2️⃣ Ask a question that would prompt the student to create a sentence about the story with the target sentence structure/grammar. You may want to provide a sentence starter.

Here's an example targeting complex sentences:

•  SLP: What did Froggy do after he went kayaking? After kayaking, Froggy…(sentence starter)

•  Student: After kayaking, Froggy went stargazing.

Continue with similar question types and sentence starters (if needed) to elicit the target sentence structure. For example:

•  What did Froggy do after he got dressed?

•  What did Froggy do after he cooked breakfast?

•  What did froggy do after he went hiking?

3️⃣ Retell the story or parts of the story with the target sentence pattern.

Check out more activity ideas here:

🔴 Complex Sentences

🟠 Conjunctions.

Hope that helps! 😊

Reference:

Ukrainetz, T. A. (2006). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding Prek-12 Literacy Achievement (1st ed.). Pro Ed.