English Language and Composition

AP Annual Conference Submission

302 - Teaching Sentence Fluency to Improve Students' Writing and Reading

Lead Presenter(s)

• BC

  Beverly Chin

  Professor & Chair, Dept. of English; Director, English Teaching Program
  University of Montana

Co-Presenter(s)

• KC

  Kate Cordes

  AP English Teacher
  Billings Senior High School

This workshop will demonstrate how teachers can use sentence combining and sentence imitation to improve students' writing. These research-based strategies can be used with any writing genre, purpose and content area and especially in AP English courses. Using sentence combining, teachers show students how to revise short, choppy sentences into more interesting, fluent, sophisticated sentences. Using sentence imitation from mentor texts, teachers help students analyze how different authors craft sentences and convey style. By imitating sentences in mentor texts, students discover how authors vary sentence beginnings, lengths and structures to engage readers. We will examine samples of students' first and revised drafts based on these strategies along with their self-assessments on sentence fluency. This highly interactive workshop will engage teachers in scaffolded instruction and enable them to create their own sentence combining and sentence imitation activities.