Which action demonstrates ongoing development of students' syntactic knowledge?

• A. Encouraging Students to Use New Vocabulary in a Variety of Contexts
• B. Providing Opportunities for Students to Engage in Partner Reading
• C. Engaging Students in Reading Increasingly More Complex Texts
• D. Giving Students Explicit Instruction in Spelling and Grammar

Answer: (C)

Syntactic knowledge grows as students repeatedly encounter and work with varied sentence structures, noticing how clauses, phrases, and punctuation create meaning and how sentence length and complexity affect interpretation. Engaging with texts that become increasingly complex gives students ongoing, authentic exposure to a range of sentence forms—from simple to multiple clauses—so they can notice patterns, experiment with structure in their own writing, and become more proficient at parsing and producing varied sentences. This continual growth in handling different syntactic forms is what demonstrates ongoing development in syntax. While using new vocabulary in different contexts, partner reading, and explicit spelling/grammar instruction support language skills, they do not target the same sustained, incremental development of sentence structure that comes from reading progressively more complex texts.