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  • Writer's pictureSteven Rea

Tips to Increase Sentence Length


As a parent or teacher you may feel that your child or student's sentence length appears shorter that you think it should be. You may have come to this conclusion by comparing to siblings or other students of the same age. If you are concerned about sentence length it may be a good idea to consult your schools Speech and Language Pathologist. However, here are some simple strategies you can try in the classroom or at home before you consult the school SLP.

To increase sentence length, it is helpful to determine what may be missing from the child’s speech. Here are some areas to look at when considering increasing sentence length.

Increase Vocabulary

It’s possible that the child does not have a large enough vocabulary to choose words from. If the child doesn’t have a large enough vocabulary, he or she may not have enough words to form longer sentences. We know from research that children don’t start combining two words together (like “my ball”) until they have at least 50 words in their vocabulary. And even then, there must be a wide range of different types of words in their vocabulary. If the child only knows 50 nouns, he’s not going to be able to combine those in many ways that make sense. A child’s early vocabulary must include nouns, verbs, descriptors, possessives (like “my”), negatives (like “no”), demonstratives (like “that”), question words (like “what”), etc. If the child you are working with has a limited vocabulary, try working on that as a means of increasing sentence length.

Improve Use of Grammatical Markers

Many times when we see children with shorter sentence length we look to the child's use of grammar. For example, a child who says “I want some cookies please” would get credit for 6 grammatical markers but a child who says “want cookie please” only gets 3. Encourage the increased use of grammatical markers through modeling them and recasting what the child has said with the correct grammar. (You can search this BLOG for more on modeling and recasting)

Use Expansions

One quick and easy technique you can use to increase sentence length is to use expansions while playing with a child. To use an expansion, you wait until the child says something on her own, and then you repeat it back to her while adding one word. For example, if the child says “go outside”, you would repeat back “I go outside” or “go outside please”, or “go play outside”. It doesn’t matter what you add. In fact, you could say it multiple times and add a different word each time. Just give the child lots of models so that she hears different ways to expand on what she’s already saying.

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