Abstract of

Reinforcing Expository Reading and Writing Skills: A More Versatile Sentence Completion Task

José A. Montelongo

Anita C. Hernández

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause–effect, compare–contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated sentences and presented in a random order, students are challenged in several ways:

• First, students must fill in the blanks with the appropriate vocabulary word.

• Then they must separate the related sentences from the unrelated ones.

• Next, they must locate the main idea or topic sentence.

• Finally, students must arrange the related sentences to form a cohesive paragraph.

The results of an investigation conducted with fourth- and fifth-grade students suggest that use of this strategy facilitates locating main ideas in addition to providing practice in forming logical paragraphs. Recommendations for introducing, creating, and modifying this activity are offered.

Abstract from Montelongo, J.A., & Hernández, A.C. (2007, March). Reinforcing Expository Reading and Writing Skills: A More Versatile Sentence Completion Task. The Reading Teacher, 60(6), 538–546. doi: 10.1598/RT.60.6.4