Het Benul Van De Zin

Eight- to ten-year-olds no longer write the way they talk: they make a distinction between speech and writing. However, they lack specialized knowledge on written language. A key issue is their lack of knowledge on sentences. The fully-fledged sentences of written language do not come naturally to language users. If children demarcate sentences in writing, they are guided by their tacit grammatical knowledge only. This knowledge misguides them.Sentences can be considered as writers* building blocks, the smallest units with which to plan and to organize text.Results of an experimental study into the effects of grammar instruction upon writing by young children not only suggest that it is very well possible to teach junior writers what are sentences in the a-rhetorical context of grammar class; children spontaneously put to use this explicit, declarative knowledge while writing, too. Thus, it seems, knowledge transfers spontaneously.Moreover, effects in a discrete point test may indicate that instruction in the grammar of sentences has students start exploiting sentences for what they are: a scaffold for writing.