Syntax Trees Make More Sense Than Traditional Sentence Diagramming

In order for seventh grade students to understand syntax, they need to understand grammatical categories. Therefore, I teach parts of speech by their morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. My students and I spend several weeks looking at the basic parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, determiners, and coordinating conjunctions. I have to spend a lot of time undoing their previously taught notions, for example, that nouns refer to people, places, or things. Instead I show them that nouns are words that follow certain markers like a/an, the, some, and no.

I continue to teach syntactic categories during my vocabulary lessons. When I introduce a new vocabulary word, I put it in a sentence on the board. Students must attempt to figure out the part of speech, through syntactic and suffixal clues before they figure out the possible meaning through contextual clues. We have had some interesting conversations and observations about words as a result of this exercise. For example, the students discovered that the regular –ed ending for a verb’s past tense can also be an adjectival suffix and that –ed adjectives can become adverbs using the suffix –ly. This discovery came about while discussing the past tense of the verb agitate:

V agitate
Past tense V agitated
Adj. agitated
Adv. agitatedly.

We have also encountered particles that look like prepositions. This provoked rich discussion. For example, when a student was asked to identify a verb from the sentence, the boy jumped over the fence, on the board, he bracketed the verb with the preposition (The boy [jumped over] the fence). We talked about why [over the fence] was the prepositional phrase, which lead to an explanation of particles in contrast to prepositions. I showed them the example, “The boy looked up the street,” in both of its meanings. The boy looked up the street in the phone book. The boy looked up the street to see his friend running down it. However, when mucking around language, I have learned that one must step gingerly, or one can step into deep holes of linguistic complexity. I am very careful how I choose my sentences. I believe that is key to keeping the objectives of each lesson few and focused, thus using students’ innate ability to illuminate syntactic rules rather than overwhelm them with burgeoning complexity.

While I teach parts of speech, I teach students about phrases and ultimately Subject, Verb, Object (SVO) word order in basic declarative sentence structure. Students begin to understand that certain grammatical categories are closely connected to other grammatical categories; for example, determiners to nouns in noun phrases and some syntactic categories are connected to entire sentences like sentential adverbials. I do not discuss transitive verbs vs. intransitive verbs until I have given my students what I consider an excellent tool to teach them phrase relationships: the syntactic tree diagram. It is a wonderful visual representation of sentence structure. I color code parts of speech for students to enhance that visual knowledge. For colorblind children, I substitute font styles for color-coding.

I begin with intransitive verbs mostly because they involve the least complex trees. I also show students that sentences are much more than just a string of words put together. There are some unexpected advantages in having students build sentence trees. One is that it levels the academic playing field. Unless students have a language disorder, all students understand this at a deep linguistic level. My highly academic students no longer have an edge.