Sentence Frames & Starters
The following resources discuss the use of sentence frames and sentence starters (or sentence stems). Both are important and effective tools to help students speak and write difficult content they are not yet comfortable generating on their own. As you watch the videos, think about how this strategy can be used in your classroom with your content area(s), rather than if the examples are reflective of your exact situation.
This two-minute video defines and provides examples of sentence frames and sentence starters. It also offers practical advice on how to use them successfully in your classroom to support your ELLs. You can find more information about this strategy on the Continental Press website.
This video from Colorín Colorado explains how sentence frames can be used to scaffold learning for ELLs and reduce their cognitive load, which allows them to focus on the targeted skill without becoming overwhelmed by the language components. We highly recommend reviewing the other strategies and resources featured on Colorín Colorado as well.
Sentence stems and frames can (and should) be used in all content areas. This video shows how they can be used in a math lesson, and the teacher explains how they not only support the students' content knowledge, but help them to develop stronger writing skills as well by providing repeated exposure to and opportunities to practice fundamental grammatical concepts.
This video also demonstrates sentence stems and frames in a math lesson, and shows how the teacher facilitates discussions about which stems are most appropriate for different scenarios. She explains that integrating them into lessons allows ELLs to participate fully in academic conversations with their peers and share their ideas, which benefits both them and their classmates.
This presentation was created to teach adverbs of frequency and food vocabulary to beginning level ELLs. The first six slides are used in combination with the Total Physical Response (TPR) strategy, which incorporates actions with vocabulary to make concepts more comprehensible and engaging. The last slide features sentence frames that are used to facilitate and support speaking and writing.
This is a lesson based on food. After the vocabulary was introduced and students added a graphic organizer to their notebooks to use as a reference, they completed daily writing activities using the sentence starters shown on the slides. Strategies such as "Turn & Talk" were utilized to support students at different proficiency levels and to incorporate all language modalities. The students were especially excited about sharing information about foods from their countries and cultures. The last slide shows a reading passage that was used with reading comprehension questions. It is also a model to introduce the students to writing a paragraph that was used as the summative assessment for this unit.