I have tried out a sorting task on word order with one learner, and I would like to share my experience.

My learner has a fairly high level of Danish, she finished the whole course in Danish (Danskuddannelse 3) in Danmark, but as it was 5 years ago and she didn't use the language since, so she has forgotten a lot. 

Normally, when working with Danish syntax I introduce the model of the Danish sentence (sætningsskema) and present the rules myself. This time I wanted to do it more in TA way, so I made a sorting task. 

I asked to learner to sort the sentences according to the sentence structure. At first she had no idea what the difference was. As it is a private course, and I can't afford letting the learner think for one hour, so I tried to help her (maybe too much) by telling that she should look at the position of the subject in the sentences. With my help the learner understood that sentence number 1 is different from sentence number 2: in number 2 subject comes first, while in number 1 something else (an adverbial) comes first.

Nevertheless, she did further sorting wrong: she thought that sentences number 3, 4 and 5 were as sentence number 2, because she didn't see that "Hende", "Peter" and "Træt" were not subjects. She asked me for a definition of subject. I gave it, though there must be a TA way of generating the understanding of the notion of the subject, can somebody give me ideas? When I helped the student to see what the subject was in the rest of the sentences, she did the sorting right, and it was not difficult. 

So I understood that for this learner the rule itself (subject first / something else first) is not a problem, the problem is that she is not able to apply the rule, because she is not always able parse the sentences - identify subjects, objects, verbs etc.

The student's feedback was positive. After sorting the sentences, we looked at those with inverted word order and discussed which pats of the sentence can stand in the initial position and induce inverted word order (objects, prepositional objects, predicates etc).