What Teachers Should Know about Sentence Comprehension Revisited

Tim Shanahan

Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on August 13, 2022. No incident led me to repost this on December 13, 2025; it was simply my own sense that revisiting this neglected aspect of teaching students to understand text would be a good idea. Originally, there was no podcast of this, and now there is. This updated version includes both a link to the podcast and to the original blog that elicited 23 thoughtful comments.

What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension

A while back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, one might think such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences, and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning of complicated sentences – undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.  

Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on “prior knowledge,” vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, and comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence tends to get short shrift in most programs and classrooms.

While that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.  

Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.

That blog articulated my opinions, but neither marshalled the research evidence nor provided much in the way of helpful instructional guidance. It called for action but was terse on specifics.

This piece should remedy those omissions.

To tell the truth, when I wrote that blog, I didn’t bother to search for research on sentence comprehension because that topic never attracted much attention. There were some old studies indicating that teaching formal grammar had no impact on comprehension or writing. That seemed to settle it for most of us.

When I was working on my doctorate, a prominent reading scholar told me, “Noam Chomsky is dead.” He was trying to dissuade me from squandering my time on something as pointless as sentence comprehension.

No matter my excuses, boy, was that a foolish oversight!

Over the past two decades – slowly, gradually – research on syntax and reading comprehension has accumulated. And, over the past couple of years, the numerous publications appearing in high-quality psychological, educational, and linguistic journals suggest that being a sentence-comprehension researcher is now a respectable line of work, along with social media consultant or TikTok dancer.

First, the research.

The desert has become an oasis. 

There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). Students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures.

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