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What is sentence structure in English? For ESL students, sentence structure is simply how we put English words together to make sentences that make sense.
Do you want to speak and write better English sentences? For English as a Second Language (ESL) learners and non-native speakers, understanding sentence structure is absolutely essential. It’s the foundation upon which all other grammar concepts are built, even more important than mastering verb tenses.
Many ESL learners focus on vocabulary and verb conjugation, but without a solid understanding of how words fit together to form sentences, communication can be difficult. The point of vocabulary is to fit into sentences in a way that makes sense.
This guide will break down sentence structure in a clear and simple way, designed specifically for ESL learners.
The Importance of Sentence Structure:
Learning English can feel like assembling a puzzle. You might have all the pieces (vocabulary), but if you don’t know how they connect, the picture won’t be complete.
Sentence structure is the instruction manual for that puzzle. It tells you how to arrange words to create meaningful thoughts. Without it, your sentences might sound awkward, confusing, or even incorrect.
Think about it: You can know the meaning of every single word in a sentence, but if those words are in the wrong order, the message can get lost.
This is especially true because not all languages follow the same word order as English. Trying to translate directly from your native language often leads to structural problems and common mistakes.
The Building Blocks of Sentence Structure: The Parts of Speech and Sentence Components:
So, what exactly is sentence structure?
It’s how we organize words and groups of words to form complete and understandable sentences. You need to understand the building blocks which are the parts of speech and sentence components in order to master sentence structure.
The Parts of Speech are “the bricks” whereas the sentence components are “the instructions” of how to arrange the parts of speech. As native speakers, we start learning English “language arts” focused on these two aspects.
The Basic Parts of a Sentence Start with the Parts Speech and Their Relationships
In my book, English Grammar Explained, I explain that there are 8 parts of “connected” speech. These 8 parts are interconnected and combine to form phrases and clauses (more on this later).
Each part of speech has a number of classifications, functions, and relationships within a sentence. If you want to understand how English sentence structure works, you must learn these relationships first.
- Nouns represent people, places, things, or ideas and can function as the subject, object, or complement in a sentence.
- Pronouns replace nouns (or antecedents) to avoid repetition.
- Determiners introduce or modify nouns by providing context about definiteness, specificity, quantity, or possession. Common determiners include articles (a, an, the), demonstratives (this, that, these, those), numbers (one, two, three), possessive adjectives (my, your, our), and quantifiers (some, many, all).
- Adjectives modify nouns, offering descriptive details.
- Verbs express an action, occurrence, a state of being, or facilitates a description. A sentence must have a verb.
- Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, providing information about manner, location, time, reason, frequency, or duration.
- Prepositions work with nouns or pronouns in phrases and act as indirect modifiers to nouns or verbs.
- Conjunctions link words, phrases, or clauses.
This is just a quick rundown of the parts of speech, so if you would like to go deeper, you’ll definitely find my series of articles about the parts of speech useful. Start with my pillar post on the parts of speech which covers everything from an overview of the parts of speech, why they are important, how they work in a sentence, and more.
The Basic Components of a Sentence Tell You Where the Parts of Speech Go to Form a Sentence:
The sentence components are the roles that words play in a sentence. A sentence is divided into 2 distinct parts – a subject and a predicate.
The subject of a sentence can be as little as one letter “I” or as much as a noun phrase complete with direct and indirect modifiers. Everything that comes before the verb of the sentence is its subject.
More importantly, the subject provides a focus from which the action flows. Although the subject can be a thing, place, or idea, I commonly refer to it as “who.”
The predicate, then, is the verb phrase which consists of the verb, its object (if there is one) and any direct or indirect modifiers.
Combine the Basic Components Together to form the “Base Clause.”
The subject and predicate together form the base clause which can stand alone as a complete sentence.
Yet, the base clause can also be extended to add more details that I call “information blocks.” These information blocks tell the listener or reader how, where, when, or why.
These blocks line up after the base clause and point back to the base clause.
You can add one information block or several. It doesn’t matter how many you add to your sentence as long as they are in the right order. This is the foundation of Word Order and when everything is correct, your sentence makes sense.
I’ll delve deeper into parts of speech and sentence components in our next post, “Meet the Team: The Connected Parts of Speech and Sentence Components,” where I’ll explore each one in detail and see how they work together.
Phrases and Clauses represent The Next Level of Sentence Structure
Once you understand the basic building blocks, you can start to create more complex sentences. This involves understanding phrases and clauses.
- Phrases are groups of related words that don’t have both a subject and a verb. They act as single units within a sentence. A phrase can make up a core component of the sentence (the noun phrase or the verb phrase), or it can play a supporting role as an extra information block (prepositional phrases, infinitive phrases, and participle phrases).
- Clauses are groups of related words that do have both a subject and a verb. They can be independent (standing alone as a sentence) or dependent (needing another clause to complete their meaning).
When you think about it, a sentence can grow in one of two ways:
1. The sentence can add adverbial modifiers to the tail end of a sentence, extending the simple sentence to get longer as you add more information blocks.
2. You grow the sentence by adding additional clauses, balancing one clause against another in either a balanced way (compound sentences) or imbalanced way (complex sentences.
Learning about phrases and clauses is crucial for understanding how to construct different types of sentences, from simple to compound-complex. We’ll cover this in more detail in “Phrases and Clauses: The Next Level of Sentence Structure.”
Word Order Plays an Important Part in Sentence Structure
Earlier in the sentence component section, I already mentioned a bit about word order, but I’ll explain a bit more here.
When you think about it, word order manifests itself at every level of the sentence from:
1. the words within a phrase,
2. to order of phrases,
3. to order of clauses.
Word Order within a phrase
For starters, every phrase type has an order. With noun phrases, it goes: Determiner then Adjective then Noun followed by any indirect modifier (prepositional phrase or relative clause).
If you’re modifying the noun with more than one adjective, there is such a thing as adjective order. This is just one example of how we order words to form phrases. The better your understanding of each phrase type, the more you will know the word order within the various phrase types.
Word Order from one phrase to the next
A second area of word order is the order between phrases. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the adverbials line up after the verb in this order: Who + doing + what (base clause) then how then where then when then why.
Even if you add all four information blocks after the verb phrase, everything makes sense when the phrases are in the right order.
If, however, you were to get out of that prescribed order, you would change the meaning of the sentence.
Word Order Rules to Follow to Make Clear Sentences
If you’re an ESL learner, you’ve probably never heard of these word order rules. Even worse, your own mother language could actively be working against your English sentence structure.
In my book, English Grammar Explained, I give you 9 grammar imperatives. You can think of these as best practices to help you form clear sentences. Some of these are rules while others are imperatives that you can break, but at a cost (of clarity).
You can get the full eBook here which works as an excellent preview of my book, but I will also briefly cover the first 2 imperatives here.
Sentence Clarity Imperative 1: Avoid separating the Subject Noun from its Verb
Earlier in the post, I mentioned that noun phrases can have indirect modifiers such as prepositional phrases or relative clauses. By indirect modifier, I mean it comes after the noun (or verb) not before.
If you have an indirect modifier after the subject noun, you are separating the subject noun from the verb.
While this may be grammatically correct, your sentence loses focus when you build your sentences this way. The longer your indirect modifier on the subject noun, the more obscure your subject noun becomes.
Even worse, the nouns within your indirect modifier can influence you to break subject-verb agreement.
When you talk about common English mistakes, this has to be one of the worst, apart from misplaced or dangling modifiers.
So, as I tend to say, you can break this first imperative, but at a cost.
Sentence Clarity Imperative 2: Avoid separating the Subject Noun from its Verb
If the first imperative was a best practice, this one is an actual rule. You must never inject any verb modifier (adverb or adverbial) between the verb and its object.
In spoken English, this is a big no-no. It sounds out of place and will instantly be noted. In writing, it’s even worse.
Furthermore, you may speak a mother language that is relaxed about this. So, if you are in the habit of translating to English, you will make mistakes like this a lot.
So, save yourself the headache of making these kinds of mistakes and fix your understanding of sentence structure. In my book, English Grammar Explained, not only do I cover these 9 grammar imperatives, but I also show you the trouble spots that can break your sentences.
If you want to learn more about the rules that can make your English sentence structure clearer, download your copy of the 9 Grammar Imperatives today!
Different Types of Sentences:
As I stated earlier, English sentences come in different forms, each with its own structure. The four main types are:
- Simple sentences: One independent clause.
- Compound sentences: Two or more independent clauses joined by a conjunction.
- Complex sentences: One independent clause and one or more dependent clauses.
Compound-complex sentences: Two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.
Compound and complex sentences involve combining two ideas according to their relationship. In some cases, we add points together while other times we contrast one idea against another. We express conditions and expected results (the conditionals) or cause and effect.
Understanding these different sentence types is essential for writing with variety and clarity. We’ll explore them fully in “Simple, Compound, Complex: Exploring Sentence Types.”
Why This Matters for ESL Learners:
Often times, I speak to non-native speakers about grammar and they are focused on the wrong things. The manner in which English is taught around the world mostly puts the emphasis on verb tense mastery.
However, I have yet to teach from a beginner or elementary book that revises the parts of speech or even goes into detail about sentence components (subject and predicate).
How can ESL and EFL resources hope to teach non-native speakers English without a strong focus on sentence structure and the parts of speech?
Mastering sentence structure is the key to improving your English fluency and accuracy. It allows you to:
- Express your thoughts clearly and effectively.
- Understand spoken and written English more easily.
- Avoid common grammatical errors.
- Communicate with confidence.
What’s more, you cannot fully master verb tenses without a strong understanding of English sentence structure.
Conclusion: The Key to Being Understood in English lies with Good Sentence Structure.
So, what is sentence structure in English? It is your key to understanding and being understood in English. It means you avoid common mistakes and broken or unclear sentences.
Learning sentence structure might seem like it’s a bit too much to handle at first, but it’s an investment that will pay off tremendously in your English language journey.
- Start off small (Who + doing + what).
- Extend the base clause by 1 adverbial (Who + doing + what + How or where or why).
- Then add 2 or more adverbial modifiers to a base clause.
- Do lots of unscramble the sentence exercises to practice sentence structure and word order.
- Then approach complex sentences like the conditionals or cause and effect from a sentence structure perspective instead of thinking in rigid verb tense rules.
By understanding the building blocks of sentences and how they fit together, you’ll be well on your way to mastering English grammar. Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll dive into the connected parts of speech and sentence components!
English Grammar Explained
For ESL and non-native English learners, basic sentence structure is often overlooked by English courses, favoring teaching verb tenses instead. Yet, it is the sentence structure that provides the foundation from which you then learn the English verb tenses. It's time to do a grammar reset and fill in your gaps of English sentence building. English Grammar Explained will systematically build your understanding of how English sentences work. Pick up your copy today!
