Five Steps to Teach Simple Sentence Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities

Many students with learning disabilities struggle with sentence writing fluency, the skill of quickly and accurately generating words that follow rules of semantics, spelling, syntax, and usage within sentence structures understandable to readers. Students who struggle with sentence writing fluency may face difficulty fully expressing their ideas while engaging in academic writing. In the present article, we describe how a combination of explicit instruction and fluency practice can improve the simple sentence writing fluency of students with learning disabilities. We detail how five design and delivery steps can help to create a supplemental writing intervention that addresses simple sentence structure, syntax, and usage.