Mentor Sentences to Enhance Comprehension
Multilingual Learners in Content Area Classrooms
Secondary students are tasked to read, understand, and respond to complex, grade-level texts. To read and understand these complex texts, students must know how words work together in sentences to produce meaning. Having "language sense" combined with other factors, such as having robust background knowledge and a vast vocabulary, are key determining factors that make a student able to read and understand complex texts. Of course, for MLs this takes time so here is a way to support them on their way.
One strategy to help them get to the main idea is to choose mentor sentences from the content reading you assigned. While some mentor sentences are meant to help with writing construction, the purpose here is to understand reading material.
Choose a sentence that matches most closely with your objective or essential question. The goal is for students to make an initial interpretation of the mentor sentence's meaning.
Content Area Example: Science
Here's an example of a common objective in 8th-grade science.
Explain to the students that they will understand the main idea of the reading by studying a mentor sentence.
Prompt students to copy the mentor sentence. Here’s the sentence?
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes through the Earth's shadow, just as a solar eclipse occurs when part of the Earth passes through the Moon's shadow.
3. Ask students to individually write and complete this sentence stem on a paper:
This sentence means that….
Encourage them to use their own words and draw upon their primary language knowledge if helpful. Give them about 2-3 minutes.
4. After the time is up, ask a few students to share how they paraphrased or interpreted the quotation. Ask a student to share their idea in a language other than English and have a student translate if possible. This shows you honor their work in their primary languages.
5. Form groups of 2-3 students (think carefully about your MLs regarding who can translate or their WIDA/language proficiency levels). Prompt students to use the following stems to guide the conversation.
Another way to say this sentence is…
I made meaning of this sentence by...
I looked at….
I noticed that…
Students can also add illustrations to support their meaning-making.
6. Prompt students to go back to their original sentence stem to revise or adjust their written responses based on what their peers shared.
Have you used mentor sentences for comprehension?
What worked? What was challenging?