Update - 23rd September 2021: this post is now, to all intents and purposes, null and void, since we've now added full authoring capabilities, allowing you to create complex SentenceBuilders. It's been left here, though, because it contains useful information about the need to give careful consideration to your SB content and ensuring that the sentences that it produces are accurate.

See this NEW blogpost: Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder "machines" that work :)

SentenceBuilders.com is primarily about teachers and students interacting with our SB Premium resources, featuring complex SentenceBuilder tables, and based largely -- but not exclusively -- on the content of the Sentence Builders books from the Language Gym team.

But the site also offers teachers the facility to create their own "column-based" resources. This blog post looks in detail at these column-based resources and makes some recommendations for creating column-based SentenceBuilder resources that work best on SentenceBuilders.com.

Column-based SentenceBuilders

A column-based SentenceBuilder (see image above) can be used to generate 100s or even 1000s of random sentences which can form the basis of word-, chunk- and sentence-level interactive activities, which scaffold listening, reading and writing practice in multiple ways.

Your user-generated column-based SentenceBuilder resources can be used as the basis for assignments and competitions that you can set up for your classes, and they can provide you with all sorts of feedback about student progress and performance.

Your column-based SentenceBuilder resource can also be used front-of-class for all sorts of interactions including speaking practice.

So... how does a column-based resource differ from an SB Premium resource?

SB Premium SentenceBuilders

Below is an example of one of our SB Premium SentenceBuilders, with multiple rows and columns, clearly indicating the "flow" (from left to right) within the table:

What you don't see in the above image are the exclusions and transformations that have been applied to make the SB "work":

• This SB is set up so that some content combinations are not possible (indicated here by the green and red), so, for example, it isn't possible to say "I love French because it's boring"
• Transformations within the resource data tell the table that when "parce que" combines with "on a...", it becomes "parce qu'on a..." 

Limitations with column-based resources

BUT the user-generated column-based SentenceBuilders that you can create for yourself on the SentenceBuilders site have the following key characteristics:

1. columns only, so no way of dividing content into rows
2. all content combinations must be viable

Point 2 (above) is crucial. Unlike the complex SentenceBuilders used for our SB Premium resources, with your own column-based SB resources...

• there is no way of separating cell content into rows
  
• there is no way of stipulating which content combinations are not possible
• there is no way of transforming content when certain words are combined

The result -- to reiterate my point 2 (above) -- is that all content combinations must be viable

This clearly has implications for the sort of things that you can include in your own column-based SB resource.

"SentenceBuilder" or "Random Sentence Generator"?

A SentenceBuilder, as most people would understand the term, is a way of setting out concisely, in table form, all of the content required to cover a particular topic or grammar point. A detailed Knowledge Organiser, if you like.

The example of the SB Premium resource shown above certainly appears to fit this description.

But because of the content limitations listed above, a column-based SB resource cannot serve as a detailed Knowledge Organiser of this kind.

You have to leave things out.

You have to be selective.

You have to include only those words and chunks which you know for sure will work with all other words and chunks.

Instead, then, I think it makes sense to view a column-based SB resource NOT as a SentenceBuilder (in the sense as described above), but rather as a Random Sentence Generator

Think along the lines of the Flippity Randomizer (the "reels" / "fruit machine" one), where randomly selected items from each reel combine together to produce a random "sentence". BUT with the obvious exception that the sentence that is generated on SentenceBuilders must be a fully-fledged grammatically correct sentence, because it (and all other sentences generated) will be used as the basis for interactive activities for your students.

Column-based SentenceBuilders that work

Let's look again at the image that appears at the top of the post:

Note that all combinations work. I know I'm laboring this point, but it really *is* important.

Note that all the protagonists are male. Why? Because I didn't want the English in column 3 to include "with his/her parents". I wanted both the Spanish and English sentences to work straight out of the box, as it were.

In the example above, if creating a traditional SentenceBuilder, I may well have grouped all of the places into blocks of masculine, feminine, "singular beginning with a vowel sound" and plural, and I would almost certainly have added a separate column, again split into 4 blocks (corresponding to the 4 mentioned previously) containing "au", "à la", "à l'" and "aux".

Obviously this isn't possible if columns can't be split into rows.

But you also have to avoid the temptation (born out of using paper sentence builders where you expect the students to be able to work out what "works" and what doesn't) to put "au", "à la", "à l'" and "aux" on their own in a 2nd column. Yes, I know that that's perfectly acceptable if creating something for students to refer to, because you want them to think about what they should choose from each column to make a sentence that works. But if you do that sort of thing with an automated sentence generating machine (that's essentially what our SBs are), you'll end up generating grammatically incorrect sentences the majority of the time.

In the column-based resource above, the focus is on likes and dislikes + free time activities + my family / friends

I've stuck to 1st person singular only so as to avoid issues with the possessives in the last column.

I think you can see that, ahem... all combinations "work".

In the above example, again, in column 2, I've included the preposition + definite article + place all together so as to make sure that it always works.

I've also included the full present tense paradigm of "aller", so I've taken care to avoid using anything further to the right that may depend on the "person" of the verb selected, such as possessive adjectives. (For example, I couldn't have used this resource to talk about who I/you/he/she/we/they go to all those places with.)

So again, it's a matter of working out what sort of content needs to be excluded so that the sentence generator always works.

This Spanish example is for practising items of clothing. It generates some pretty daft sentences, but that's OK. The important thing is that they work (grammatically).

Again, with this sort of resource, you have to avoid the temptation to place the colours in a separate column with all possible permutations (e.g. blanco/a/os/as) in the way that you might do if you wanted a student to read it and work out for themselves how to modify the adjective to build a correct sentence. As demonstrated previously, that sort of thing simply will not work when you're dealing with an automatic sentence generating machine.

The example above practises all sorts of really useful language: modal expression + infinitive + time frame

Avoiding non-viable consequences

As discussed previously, you will have to consciously omit certain types of content if you want to create random sentence generators that "work". We've given some examples above, but here is a longer (but by no means exhaustive) list of the sorts of things you have to be careful to avoid, with X and Y referring to columns within your SB table:

• different gendered articles in X + nouns in Y
  
• different persons in X + possessives in Y
• different persons in X + different persons in Y
• different gendered nouns in X + adjectives in Y
• positive & negative opinions in X + reasons in Y
• positive & negative opinions in X + opposite conjunctions (e.g. because / although) in Y
• different verb tenses in X + time phrases in Y
• persons in X + same persons in Y, but where some combinations are nonsensical, e.g. "I am taller than me"
• unpunctuated clauses in X + unpunctuated clauses in Y (i.e. result is a jumble of disconnected clauses)
• sections in X and Y where each option in X matches with only 1 option in Y. (This sort of thing works great in a SB used for reference, where students have to use their intelligence to put together the correct bits, but in an automatic sentence generator, it results in nonsense...)

In the above image, for example, -- expressing basic opinions about school subjects in Spanish -- I've had to avoid using likes and dislikes (opting here to focus just on positive / likes) so as to avoid issues over positive and negative adjectives in the last column. (i.e. avoiding sentences such as "I hate Spanish because it is fun")

I've also made sure to only include masculine school subjects in this particular SB so as to avoid having to include masculine and feminine adjectives in the last column. Although you may think it's fine to get around this problem by including "divertido/a" etc, which would work fine if you were requiring students to work out what is required to create their own sentence, with our automatic sentence generating machine, you'll end up with 100s of interactive activities requiring students to write out "divertido/a" rather than the correct form as appropriate to the gender of the noun.

(BTW, I noticed after posting the above image and explanation that I could have left out "divertido", and that way I could have included feminine singular subjects in column 2, since all the other adjectives that I've chosen don't change in the feminine. But you get the point.)

In conclusion...

To recap what I've said above:

Don't try to make your existing sentence builder fit entirely into a column-based resource. It doesn't work that way. You have to leave things out and focus on ensuring that all combinations are viable. Be prepared to create several column-based random sentence generators to cover the content of a particular topic, rather than trying to fit it all into one.

Remember that a column-based resource is, above all, a random sentence generator rather than a comprehensive knowledge organiser. It's for generating activities that work, not for laying out in detail all that needs to be covered by a particular topic. And remember that you can use our column-based random sentence generators to practise content across topics too.

Hope this helps :o)

BTW, I feel I should point out that the decision to allow users to create their own resources on SentenceBuilders.com was a last-minute decision, one which in fact delayed the launch of the site by a several weeks. The primary focus of the SentenceBuilders site remains the many SB Premium resources containing complex SentenceBuilders, each with 100+ activities at the word, chunk, and sentence level (and even paragraph-level for many resources), based primarily (but not exclusively) on the content from the best-selling SentenceBuilder books from the team at The Language Gym.