A sixth-grade teacher is planning explicit instruction to develop students' ability to read and understand complex sentences. Which skill should the teacher focus on?

Focusing on deconstructing complex sentences into independent and dependent clauses is essential for helping sixth-grade students enhance their reading and comprehension skills. When students learn to identify the components of complex sentences, including the main idea and the subordinate information provided by dependent clauses, they become more adept at understanding sentence structure and meaning.

By breaking down sentences into their constituent parts, students can better comprehend how different clauses interact to convey a complete thought. This skill is particularly important as they encounter more sophisticated texts that use a variety of sentence structures. Understanding the relationship between independent and dependent clauses also helps students improve their writing skills, as they can apply their knowledge to create more complex and varied sentence structures in their own work.

The other options focus on specific elements of language and grammar but do not provide the same depth of understanding necessary for comprehending complex sentences as a whole. For instance, identifying transition words enhances fluency and coherence but does not address sentence structure. Active and passive voice distinctions are helpful for style but not central to understanding how sentences are formed. Similarly, distinguishing between pronouns is more focused on individual word functions rather than the overall sentence structure. Consequently, emphasizing the skill of deconstructing complex sentences aligns best with the goal of fostering comprehension of sophisticated texts.