Sentence Starters: A Godsend for Teaching Writing

If you’ve ever attended a training on how to support English Language Learners (ELLs) in your classroom, you’ve probably been introduced to sentence starters.

The idea is that, whether for discussion or writing, these students, in particular, need help developing the academic language they’re expected to use in formal academic settings. This is especially important because academic language is more challenging than conversational English and less likely to come up naturally in beginning-level language classes.

In most trainings, sentence starters are presented as scaffolds: as students become more adept at using the sentence starters, we stop providing them. Students, having learned the appropriate academic language from the sentence starters, are then able to construct similar sentences on their own.

Because sentence starters are intended to be a form of scaffolding, they can easily get a bad rap in education, especially in high school ELA classrooms. We have long been big fans of using sentence starters at all levels, especially in standard-level courses where we have many struggling and disengaged students, yet we’ve worked with many colleagues who were hesitant to join us in an approach they saw as hand-holding.

But in our experience, sentence starters are a valuable tool for all students that go beyond merely introducing academic language to actually improving student thought and writing at all levels. Teaching writing often feels like an impossible task, and this is one of our small strategies that pays large dividends.

The Benefits of Using Sentence Starters

All students need to learn appropriate academic language.

Since leaving the traditional classroom, Steph has started teaching AP Seminar and AP Research at a private online school, and in the trainings for these programs, she was introduced to Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say, a common text in AP Capstone classes around the country.

She fell in love, and had she been introduced to the book sooner, we would have been even more passionate about using sentence starters, especially with our honors and AP students.

The larger premise of the book is that, especially in our increasingly polarized world, students need to learn how to enter ongoing conversations in ways that listen to and acknowledge before responding to what others have said.

Graff and Birkenstein’s approach to teaching students how to do this is to provide templates (what we refer to as sentence starters or sentence frames), and we found a couple of their comments particularly relevant to our approach (the quotations come from the Kindle version of the Preface without page numbers; emphasis is ours):

“Our templates . . . have a generative quality, prompting students to make moves in their writing that they might not otherwise make or even know they should make. The templates in this book can be particularly helpful for students who are unsure about what to say or who have trouble finding enough to say, often because they consider their own beliefs so self-evident that they need not be argued for.”
“We proceeded from the premise that all writers rely on certain stock formulas that they themselves didn’t invent—and that many of these formulas are so commonly used that they can be represented in model templates that students can use to structure and even generate what they want to say.”
“The trouble [with not using templates out of a fear that they encourage passive learning and formulaic writing] is that many students will never learn on their own to make the key intellectual moves that our templates represent. While seasoned writers pick up these moves unconsciously through their reading, many students do not. Consequently, we believe, students need to see these moves represented in the explicit ways that the templates provide.”

While Graff and Birkenstein are obviously referencing their own templates specifically, we strongly believe that the sentiments are reflective of any well-thought-out sentence starters. Much of what we provide in our sentence starters is not all that original in the first place (and Graff and Birkenstein elaborate on that point), but more importantly, all of our students, not just our ELL students, need to be taught how to argue effectively and to say more than they might be inclined to say on their own.

Sentence starters encourage students to write more.

One of our biggest goals in providing sentence starters to our students was to get them to respond to text-dependent questions with more than one word or to write body paragraphs that actually included all parts of the 5C paragraph format.

By requiring students to complete sentence starters or fill out sentence frames, we could get them to write multiple sentences in response to a text-dependent question, providing the additional explanation or examples that they so often didn’t realize they needed to provide.

When it came to essays, sentence starters helped them to see just how much writing they needed to do in order to fully address a prompt. At the beginning of the year in our standard-level sophomore class, we started with a writing unit in which students wrote a paragraph, guided by sentence starters. But this paragraph included three pieces of evidence, each followed by context and commentary sentences.

On more than one occasion, we had students comment that this single paragraph (meaty, we admit) was more than they had ever written before, even in an essay. More importantly, they were able to recognize that they needed to provide more than they thought was initially necessary in order to fully address the prompt.

Sentence starters help students focus on the quality of what they’re saying rather than simply what to say next.

Because students weren’t struggling to know what to say next, they could focus on their ideas (a point that Graff and Birkenstein make as well). Of course, it’s valuable at some point for students to know how to construct a paragraph on their own, but we would much rather they focus on having something substantial to say, particularly in honors and PreAP courses where we’re trying to encourage both sophisticated writing and sophistication of ideas.

Essay graphic organizer with sentence frames and sentence starters.

It also ensured students developed a line of reasoning because we included the transitions and signposting that help students connect and present their thoughts about a text in an organized way. Line of reasoning is an essential part of the rubric for the free-response questions in many AP courses, but it’s often hard for students to grasp. Showing them how to do it can often be more helpful than explaining it.

Sentence starters guide students to get more out of a text.

By embedding clues about what we were looking for in our sentence starters, we helped students to answer questions more thoughtfully. Many times, students are capable of more insightful responses than they naturally produce, but they need guidance to get to that point. Sentence starters are a valuable tool in directing them to the part of the text we want them to look at or indicating how we intend for them to approach a question.

Sentence starters force you to be more thoughtful about the phrasing of your questions.

When we initially started using sentence starters, we provided students with a list of generic sentence starters that they could use for any writing task. But over time, that became frustrating: not all sentence starters work well for all situations, and our students don’t have the nuanced understanding of writing to know how to adapt generic sentence starters effectively for their purposes.

As we started crafting custom sentence starters for our text-dependent questions and our essays, it forced us to be more thoughtful about what we were asking students to do. We realized that sometimes our directions weren’t clear or didn’t lend themselves to the response we actually wanted.

As teachers who always wanted to be learning and growing, this was a valuable tool in helping us to improve the quality and specificity of our questions, learning how to construct them carefully to elicit the response we wanted.

It also helped us to better understand what a good conclusion looks like. When we weren’t using sentence starters, it was so easy for us to just say, “You know, summarize your argument and add a key insight.” But when we had to think through what that actually looked like (and when we did it for single paragraphs rather than full essays, where a summary sentence is wildly redundant), we got a lot better at explaining to students how they could write meaningful conclusion sentences that went beyond summary.

Students can experience more independent success when they use sentence starters.

As we moved toward a flipped classroom model of instruction, we were always on the lookout for tools that would help our students be more independent.

When we took the time to provide sentence-by-sentence instructions or custom sentence starters, more students were able to complete work accurately without us talking them through every single step, and it was more likely to stop us from laboring away at one student’s desk for an entire class period. This freed us up to circulate more with our students and provide help to those who truly needed it.

Anything that supports our students so they can better navigate texts and assignments independently is a good thing.

Using sentence starters makes grading easier.

In our reading assignments, we provided students with 1–2 text-dependent questions that had to be answered using sentence starters. We used Actively Learn, which allowed us to provide personalized feedback and send questions back to students for revision. This was a valuable tool, but it made for an incredibly time-consuming process.

When we used sentence starters, not only could we immediately identify students who hadn’t followed directions and return their work for revision, but it was much easier to quickly identify whether students had produced the response we were looking for.

Even with essays, it was much easier to follow students’ line of reasoning and determine whether their understanding of a text was limited, superficial, or thoughtful.

Sentence starters can be a valuable tool in combating rampant AI use.

For most of our careers, the Internet has been a problem: students can find what they’re looking for with a quick Google, copy-and-paste answers or even full essays, and easily share files with one another.

But with the advent of AI technology like ChatGPT, we know that plagiarism is worse than ever, with many students relying on AI tools to do their thinking for them.

One of our best strategies for combating AI and plagiarism was providing students with such detailed instructions that it would be (a) easy to tell when they hadn’t followed them, and (b) more difficult for them to get the Internet or AI to produce an appropriate response than it would be to just write it themselves.

Of course this isn’t foolproof (nothing is), but anything we can find to make it harder for students to pawn off their work on the computer is a valuable tool.

Many of us are not teaching in ideal circumstances.

This is, perhaps, our biggest reason and rationale for relying so heavily on sentence starters.

Yes, in an ideal world, our students internalize the academic language modeled in sentence starters after one or two assignments, and then we remove the scaffold and they write increasingly thoughtful, well-structured essays on their own.

But throughout our careers, and now in our work at Three Heads, we have always strived to be realists, and the majority of teachers in America are not teaching in ideal circumstances.

Our classrooms are full of English Learners, students with learning disabilities, students working below grade-level, students with all kinds of social-emotional issues, and students with behavioral issues. Post-pandemic, these issues have only multiplied.

The majority of us in public high schools see 200 students each day, 40 at a time, and we’re responsible for improving their reading and writing skills, skills that take years of dedicated practice to learn well.

Our students are increasingly disengaged with decreasing attention spans. Many of them don’t want to work, don’t see the value in doing things that are hard, and are tempted at every turn by technology that quickly distracts and offers to make their work as simple as a touch of a button.

So, if we can find a tool that makes our students more likely to produce writing, particularly writing of some quality? We’re all for it.

Sentence Starters for Text-Dependent Questions

For our standard-level students, we started providing sentence starters for short-answer text-dependent questions. Our goal was to get them to write in complete sentences and to elaborate beyond a single word or phrase. Here are a few examples:

Cassius believes the letter he plans to write to Brutus will “[play] upon his friend’s honor” and “lead Brutus to take the final step” (58). What “final step” is Cassius hoping this letter will achieve? Use this sentence starter to compose your response: By writing this letter, Cassius hopes Brutus will take the “final step” of . . .

How does Polyphemus (the Cyclops) fail to show xenia to Odysseus and his men (9.230–99)? Use the sentence starters answer the question in complete sentences, and provide a quotation that shows Polyphemus failing to show xenia to support your response. Polyphemus fails to show xenia to Odysseus and his men when he . . . We can see this when he/the narrator says, . . . This is a violation of the rules of xenia because . . .

Sentence Starters for Body Paragraphs

A theme unit using the film The LEGO Batman Movie includes sentence starters and sentence frames to help students construct a paragraph.

For essays, we started providing students with options for each sentence. Not only does this help them to feel more like participants in the process and select the sentence starters (or sentence frames) that best fit their ideas, but it gives us some variety since every student isn’t essentially writing the same response. Here are a couple examples from our introductory unit, in which students write a 5C analytical paragraph about The LEGO Batman Movie:

Sentence 1: Claim—Make the claim you will be supporting in your paragraph. In this case, it will be your theme statement. Choose one of the following sentence frames:

One theme of Chris McKay’s The LEGO Batman Movie is [insert theme statement here]; this theme is revealed through Batman’s change from being [insert adjective from Part 1 here] to [insert adjective from Part 3 here].
Chris McKay’s The LEGO Batman Movie illustrates the theme that [insert theme statement here]; through Batman’s change from being [insert adjective from Part 1 here] to [insert adjective from Part 3 here], the audience is able to see the truth of this theme.

Sentence 2: Transition Sentence—State what Batman was doing at the beginning of the movie and what type of person he seemed to be based on those events. Choose one of the following sentence starters:

At the beginning of the movie, Batman is [insert an action Batman is doing here], which made him seem [insert adjective from Part 1 here].
When the film starts, Batman is [insert an action Batman is doing here]; through this, it appears that Batman is [insert adjective from Part 1 here].
When the audience first meets Batman, he is [insert an action Batman is doing here]; this makes us believe Batman is [insert adjective from Part 1 here].

When and How to Wean Students Off the Sentence Starters

Step 1: Don’t Wean Them Off

Not all students need to be weaned off sentence starters. If you’re teaching a standard-level class, particularly a class with many students who are below grade-level, then what’s the rush? If these tools are getting you results, making your life easier, and improving students’ writing, then just keep using them.

Learning how to write is a lifetime process, not a single-year process, and not all students will be ready to have this support removed after one year. And for many of our students, particularly those who are not AP-bound or college-bound, getting them to produce acceptable-quality work is a far higher priority than getting them to produce academic language without sentence starters.

Step 2: Switch to Sentence-by-Sentence Instructions

In our honors class, we provided explicit sentence starters for students’ first essay, but we did want these future AP students to construct academic sentences on their own. They still needed support in crafting appropriate responses, so we provided them with sentence-by-sentence instructions. The language was theirs, but they still received guidance on what to do.

Here’s an example of our sentence-by-sentence instructions for a text-dependent question. Our directions for body paragraphs of essays followed a similar format:

Although all three men are struggling, Mac seems to be “fading fastest” both mentally and physically (97). Referring to details from paragraphs 78–99, explain how and why Louie and Phil seem to be faring better. Your response must be formatted as a 5C paragraph according to the guidelines below.

Claim: Begin by making a claim that answers the question directly. This means you must state how AND why Louie and Phil seem to be faring better than Mac. [Remember, do not make “I” statements in your Claim.]
Concrete Evidence Sentence: Integrate and cite a quotation that supports your claim using one of the four methods for integration explained in the Student Scholar’s Guide to Quotations. To fully address the question, this must show/illustrate Louie and Phil doing something that explains how and why they are faring better than Mac. Remember, show don’t tell! Do not simply summarize!
Context Sentence: Make it clear for your reader what this quotation is referring to; what are the circumstances surrounding the quotation you have provided? What has happened just before (or what happens just after) this quotation that your reader needs to know about in order to understand why the quotation is relevant?
Commentary Sentence: Explain how your quotation demonstrates how and why Phil and Louie are faring better than Mac.
Connection Sentence: Conclude your response by explaining what this comparison suggests will happen to the three men.

Step 3: Remind Students to Use a Specific Paragraph Format

In our AP Literature class, we started with sentence-by-sentence directions like those above, but we eventually transitioned to just reminding students to use the 5C format: Claim, Concrete Evidence Sentence, Context Sentence, Commentary Sentence, Connection Sentence.

Now students had to produce their own language and remember how to address each of the 5Cs, but they still had a reminder to follow rather than being left entirely to their own devices.

Step 4: Remove All Scaffolds

If you have students who are demonstrating mastery of each of the steps above, congratulations! You’re in a position to remove all scaffolds and let them at it.

For some of us, we may be able to provide these opportunities interspersed throughout the year. For example, our class process essays in our non-AP classes always included either sentence starters or sentence-by-sentence directions. But our school also did schoolwide writing 3–4 times throughout the year, so students had opportunities to test out their 5C knowledge and academic language on their own.

Some of them did apply what they had learned, and it was always exciting to see. Some of them didn’t, and the scores balanced out the “scores with support” in their grades, providing a more accurate picture of their writing ability without completely tanking their grades.

In our AP classes, we did a lot of timed writing, and, of course, the AP exam itself does not provide scaffolds. We often provided sentence-by-sentence directions for text-dependent questions, but students were on their own for essays.

This hybrid approach is a useful way to hold students accountable while still reaping the benefits of sentence starters.

Teaching writing is one of the most challenging things we do, and we found our greatest successes when we focused on small things that had a big impact. For us, using sentence starters regularly was one of those small things that made a big difference in our students’ writing. The support removed the barrier of not knowing what to say next so we could focus on getting them to actually produce writing and improve the quality of their responses.

Where do you stand on sentence starters? Love them? Hate them? Mixed feelings? Reach out and let us know at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.

Interested in trying out our custom-made sentence starters for yourself? Check out our LEGO Batman mini-unit that introduces students to the 5C paragraph format. The standard version includes sentence starters for each sentence while the PreAP version includes sentence-by-sentence directions.