Abstract
The present paper examines how students between grades 4 and 9 solve syntactic tasks. The paper analyzes (both quantitatively and qualitatively) test results obtained from more than 900 students from four different Prague schools to establish: (i) student success rate in syntactic tasks examining the comprehension and application of various types of knowledge according to Bloom's revised taxonomy of cognitive goals, (ii) how students used their prior knowledge to solve such tasks, and (iii) how students used their knowledge of the syntactic curriculum while solving the tasks.
The tests examined students' abilities to transform non-sentences into sentences, identify a syntactic pair in a sentence, and determine the number of clauses in a sentence. On the one hand, this study shows that the students' knowledge of syntax was substantial, which enabled them to solve syntactic tasks.
On the other hand, the students struggled to use terminology correctly.