A Strong Book
a review by Doreen Anderson

Strong, William and Carol J. Strong Rhythms and Rhymes: Language and Literacy Development Through Sentence Combining, Thinking Publications, 1999.

Strong Rhythms and Rhymes: Language and Literacy Development through Sentence Combining by William and Carol J. Strong is an excellent resource for classroom teachers who want to use chants to teach sentence-combining to their students in grades 1-6. It is also useful for teaching students in need of language development, students in clinical or special education settings, preschool, kindergarten, ELL, large or small groups and with individuals in one-on-one settings.

The Strongs point out that using chants to practice sentence combining is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Chanting provides a scaffold, or support, for improved phonological awareness, syntactic fluency, and joyful expression. Chanting allows students to orally rehearse new concepts and structures, to use multiple modalities, and to have fun. All of these aspects aid students in their active learning.

The Strongs include background information for teachers about how children learn, including information about Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and Krashen’s comprehensible input. They present research-based rationale for using sentence-combining activities and what research has shown to be the results of using sentence-combining.

The Strongs wanted to design a book that busy educators would find easy to use. I think that they have been very successful in reaching this goal. Their book not only teaches educators how and why to use sentence-combining chants, but it also contains 100 chants for immediate use. All of the chant exercises follow the Four-Step Teaching Paradigm listed below:
1. Preview and plan instruction,
2. Demonstrate the sentence-combining task,
3. Involve students in varied chanting, and
4. Extend the chant exercise.
The educator page for each chant lists the chant’s model, syntax goals, rhyme families, teaching ideas (for introductory sharing, vocabulary targets, and extension activities), and space for comments, observations and additional teaching ideas.

The book also has very complete appendixes which include sample goals and objectives, reproducible famous stories, and recording forms. There is an extensive list of references and indexes for locating chants by title, developmental level, rhyme families, and syntactic structures.

Strong Rhythms and Rhymes is an excellent resource for using sentence-combining chants to improve language development. Research has shown strong evidence that sentence-combining (SC) promotes gain in the ease of sentence construction (syntactic fluency) and movement up the developmental ladder (maturity), moderate support that SC practice transfers to the real writing of children, enabling them to produce better prose, and mixed support that SC improves reading comprehension. There may also be other linguistic benefits. Because of the positive research results attributed to sentence combining, and the completeness of the Strong’s book for those wishing to implement this practice, I will definitely be using it in my second grade classroom next year.