Sentence Frames

Sentence frames support students’ language production by providing a structure to communicate about a topic. Helpful sentence frames are open ended to amplify language production rather than constrain it. The table shows examples of generic sentence frames that can support common disciplinary language functions across a variety of content topics. Some of the lessons in these materials include suggestions of additional sentence frames that could support the specific content and language functions of that lesson.

Language Function	Sample Sentence Frames and Question Starters
Describe	It looks like… I notice that… I wonder if… Let’s try… A quantity that varies is ___. What do you notice? What other details are important?
Explain	First, I ___ because… Then I… I noticed ___, so I… I tried ___, and what happened was… How did you get…? What else could we do?
Justify	I know ___ because… I predict ___ because… If ___, then ___ because… Why did you…? How do you know…? Can you give an example?
Generalize	___ reminds me of ___ because… ___ will always ___ because… ___ will never ___ because… Is it always true that…? Is ___ a special case?
Critique	That is/isn’t true because… This method works/doesn’t work because… We can agree that… ___’s idea reminds me of… Another strategy is ___ because… Is there another way to say/do…?
Compare and Contrast	___ and ___ are the same/alike because… ___ and ___ are different because… One thing that is the same is… One thing that is different is… How are ___ and ___ different? What do ___ and ___ have in common?
Represent	___ represents ___. ___ stands for ___. ___ corresponds to ___. Another way to show ___ is… How else could we show this?
Interpret	We are trying to… We will need to know… We already know… It looks like ___ represents… Another way to look at it is… What does this part of ___ mean? Where does ___ show…?

Advancing Mathematical Language and Access for Multilingual Learners