Sentence writing intervention for at-risk writers in upper elementary grades

Abstract

Fluent production of a variety of grammatically correct sentences is essential to overall writing quality across genres. Sentence-production skills become increasingly important as students prepare to transition from the elementary grades to middle-school. Many students in the upper-elementary grades, however, struggle with sentence production skills—especially writers with a learning disability. This paper provides useful information for educators focusing on improving the quality of sentence-level writing skills for students with learning disabilities in Grades 3–5. Specifically, guidance is provided for using (a) assessment to inform sentence-level intervention and (b) a sequence of instructional practices for improving foundational sentence-level production skills.