The Connections Standards
and Linguistic
Difficulty
The connections standards
frequently ask students to talk about the text in the third
person, as a group of ideas or abstract concepts.
Typically, two or three connected sentences will be
generated to describe locations and thus make more extensive
use of prepositions ("Here is the library. The history
books are on the top shelf"). Connecting what the text
says to a students' expression of its information also calls
for subordinate clauses with "that" to connect the position
of the speaker with the information in the text ("I think
that the library is a very large room") and relative clauses
to express relationships ("Those are the books that
Scarlett's father reads").