Standards-Aligned Sentence Stems for Secondary English Learners
Download our free standards-aligned sentence stems for secondary English learners. The printable set is organized by academic function so students can quickly find the language they need to clarify, infer, use evidence, analyze, summarize, agree or disagree, and defend a claim.
Rather than giving every student the same sentence frame, each function progresses from Start → Build → Academic, allowing students to participate in the same academic task at different levels of English proficiency.
Reading Growth Wasn't the Whole Story for My Secondary English Learners
Years ago, I saw something in my classroom that changed the way I thought about English development.
I was working with intermediate English learners, and we were doing a lot of independent reading.
Students read books they could understand. I met with them individually for reading conferences. We talked about what they were reading, what they understood, and what they were noticing. Over time, I saw significant reading growth.
Some students made enough progress that I was convinced they were ready to reclassify.
Then the assessment data came back.
Several of the students I expected to reclassify didn't.
At first, that didn't make sense. They were clearly stronger readers. They understood substantially more English than they had before. They could talk to me about what they were reading.
But when I looked more closely at what the assessment actually required, I started seeing the gap.
The students often understood the idea.
They didn't always have the academic language to express it.
They were missing some of the Tier 2 vocabulary and language structures necessary to explain relationships, support an inference, analyze evidence, or construct an academic written response.
Independent reading had helped build their language.
But comprehension alone wasn't enough.
English Learners Need Language for Academic Thinking
Consider the difference between understanding a text and answering a question about it.
A student may understand that a character is afraid.
Then we ask:
What can you infer about the character? Use evidence from the text to support your response.
Suddenly, the student has several things to do at once.
They have to understand the question. They have to make the inference. They have to locate evidence. They have to connect the evidence to their inference. And they have to express all of that using the type of academic English expected on a secondary-level assignment or assessment.
That's a very different task from simply understanding the story.
For a student developing English, the language required to demonstrate knowledge can become a barrier between what the student understands and what the student is able to show.
That is where sentence stems can be extremely useful.
Sentence Stems Are Scaffolds for Academic Language
A good sentence stem doesn't give students the answer.
It gives them a structure for expressing the answer.
For example, one of the functions in our downloadable set is Make an Inference.
A student who needs substantial language support might begin with:
Start:I think ___.
As the student's English develops, that same thinking can become:
Build:I think ___ because ___.
Eventually, the student can move toward:
Academic:I can infer ___ because ___.
The academic skill hasn't changed.
The student is still making an inference.
What changes is the sophistication of the language used to communicate that thinking.
That distinction matters.
We don't want to lower the intellectual demand of the lesson simply because a student is learning English. We want to provide enough linguistic support for the student to participate in the intellectual work.
Why Organize Sentence Stems by Function?
A lot of classroom sentence-stem posters become collections of phrases.
Students see things like:
I think...According to the text...I agree...This shows...
The problem is that students may still not know when to use them.
That is why this set is organized by function.
Students aren't searching the wall for a random phrase. They are identifying what they are trying to accomplish.
Do I need to:
clarify something?
make an inference?
use evidence?
analyze an idea?
summarize?
respond to someone else's thinking?
defend or challenge a claim?
The sentence stem then becomes a tool for completing that academic function.
This is also why the stems are standards-aligned. Secondary English standards repeatedly ask students to perform these types of actions across reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
The exact text may change.
The academic functions repeat constantly.
Academic Language Has to Be Taught
One of the mistakes we can make with intermediate English learners is assuming that conversational fluency means they no longer need explicit language support.
These students may sound highly proficient.
They can talk with classmates. They understand classroom routines. They can tell stories and explain what happened over the weekend.
But academic English contains structures students may encounter far less frequently outside school.
Think about the language students need to:
establish cause and effect,
compare competing ideas,
explain how evidence supports a conclusion,
qualify an argument,
summarize complex information,
distinguish a claim from supporting evidence,
or explain an author's reasoning.
These structures do not necessarily develop at the same rate as conversational English.
And they matter enormously in secondary school.
Students are increasingly asked not simply to know something, but to explain what they know in an academic way.
Tier 2 Vocabulary Is Part of the Same Problem
Vocabulary also plays an important role.
Independent reading can be an incredibly powerful source of vocabulary development. Students encounter words repeatedly, see them used in context, and gradually build a much larger language system.
But many of the words students need for school are not simply topic-specific terms.
They are high-utility academic words such as:
infer, indicate, contrast, evidence, significant, consequence, establish, demonstrate, analyze, justify.
These Tier 2 words appear across subjects.
A student might encounter evidence in English class, significant in science, contrast in history, and justify in mathematics.
Sentence stems provide one way to repeatedly place this academic vocabulary inside meaningful language structures.
Instead of memorizing the word infer in isolation, students repeatedly use:
I can infer ___ because ___.
Now vocabulary, syntax, speaking, and academic thinking are working together.
The Goal Is Independence
Sentence stems should not become permanent crutches.
The goal is not for a tenth-grade student to need I think ___ because ___ forever.
The goal is repeated successful use.
At first, the student sees the structure.
Then the student uses the structure.
Then the structure becomes familiar.
Eventually, the student produces that kind of academic language without looking at the wall.
That is what good scaffolding should accomplish.
It provides temporary access to something students are still learning to do independently.
Make Academic Language Visible
That experience with my intermediate students changed the way I viewed language development.
The reading growth was real.
The comprehension growth was real.
But I had underestimated the distance between understanding English and producing the kind of English schools measure.
Students need opportunities to read extensively.
They need conversations about what they read.
They need rich vocabulary exposure.
But they also need explicit opportunities to practice the language of inference, evidence, analysis, explanation, and argument.
One simple way to begin is to make those structures visible in the classroom.
Download the Free Standards-Aligned Sentence Stems
We've created a printable set of standards-aligned sentence stems for secondary English learners, organized by academic function and differentiated from Start → Build → Academic.
Print them, cut out the speech bubbles, and place them where students can actually reference them during reading, discussion, and writing.
Help Students Ace the Next Level
Sentence stems can help students express the academic language they need right now. But students also need a systematic way to continue building the vocabulary, reading ability, and language structures that allow those supports to eventually disappear.
That's the idea behind Ace the Next Level.
Ace the Next Level is designed to help English learners build the language they need to move beyond their current level and succeed with increasingly complex academic English.
Because the goal isn't simply to help students complete today's assignment.
It's to help them Ace the Next Level.
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