If you've ever watched a student decode every word in a passage and still struggle with comprehension, you already know that reading isn't just about phonics and vocabulary.
When Grammar is often the barrier, and as students progress through grade school, they are faced with increasingly complex structures. These sentence types, as ubiquitous as they are in academic reading, don’t make it into therapy often enough…I just used one right there—did you catch it?
Here's what the research tells us: when we're strategic about which sentence structures we target in therapy, we strengthen the student's broader grammar system and support higher reading comprehension scores. Before we can target these structures intentionally, we need to know which ones elude our students most and why.
Three Sentence Structures That Consistently Challenge Students with Language Impairment
Adverbial Clauses with Temporal or Causal Conjunctions
These are the sentences that start with words like before, after, because, although, and unless—and they're everywhere in academic text. The trouble is that students often rely on an order-of-mention strategy, assuming events happen in the sequence they're presented linguistically. When a science textbook says, "Before the Red Cross arrived, the storm hit the coast," students may incorrectly conclude that aid came first. Even trickier: "I went to the store because I was asked" gets mentally flipped to went → asked, missing the causal relationship entirely. You'll find these constructions dominating social studies texts, science passages, and even math word problems.
Center-Embedded Relative Clauses
A relative clause is a dependent clause that modifies a noun. When it's embedded right in the middle of an independent clause, it splits that sentence into two distant parts that students have to mentally reconnect. Consider: "The water molecules that cling to particles form tiny ice crystals." Students relying on a recency effect or Subject-Verb-Object strategy often conclude that particles form ice crystals, rather than recognizing that the relative clause is describing the water molecules. These constructions are common in informational text, news articles, and expository writing where authors need to add descriptive detail without creating choppy sentences.
Object Complement Clauses
Object complements follow a restricted set of cognitive and linguistic verbs—words like think, know, decide, conclude, predict, assume. The object complement becomes an obligatory part of the sentence: "The scientist concluded that the experiment failed" can't grammatically exist without that dependent clause. Students struggle with these because the syntactic operations required to process object complements differ from other complex sentences, and the verbs that take these complements appear with high frequency in academic discourse.
Making Complex Sentences Accessible in Your Therapy Sessions
Start by previewing your student's curriculum materials—their social studies and science passages, math homework, and chapter books. Highlight sentences containing these three structures and keep a running bank of real examples.
When you find a tricky sentence, break down the sentence to make the structure visible. Take "Marie Curie, who discovered radium, won two Nobel prizes" and break it into simpler sentences: "Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes" + "Marie Curie discovered radium." Use visual cues—write sentences on large paper strips, then cut them into component clauses and rearrange to support comprehension and flexibility. Students can use colored highlighters to identify target clauses in passages as they increase their independence with this practice.
Make sure to practice producing these sentence types alongside comprehending them! Give students sentence starters with subordinating conjunctions (Before I came to school today..., After we finish this session..., Because it's almost winter... ).The research is clear that students with the lowest baseline performance on complex sentences show the greatest gains from intervention, which means our struggling students stand to benefit most from this practice.
May your syntax trees bloom this spring, and may the wind be always at your back!
Author: Teadora Taddeo, M.S., CCC-SLP