The effect of sawteeth on plasma performance and transport in the plasma of tokamak is an important problem in the fusion field. Sawtooth oscillations can trigger off heat and turbulence pulses that propagate into the edge plasma, and thus enhancing the edge shear flow and inducing a transition from low confinement mode to high confinement mode. The influences of turbulence spreading and symmetry breaking on edge shear flow with sawtooth crashes are observed in the J-TEXT tokamak. The edge plasma turbulence and shear flow are measured using a fast reciprocating electrostatic probe array. The experimental data are analyzed using some methods such as conditional average and probability distribution function. After sawtooth crashes, the heat and turbulence pulses in the core propagate to the edge, with the turbulence pulse being faster than the heat pulse. The attached figures (a)–(e) show the core electron temperature, and the edge electron temperature, turbulence intensity, turbulence drive and spreading rates, Reynolds stress and its gradient, and shearing rates, respectively. After sawtooth crashes, the edge electron temperature increases and the edge turbulence is enhanced, with turbulence preceding temperature. The enhanced edge turbulence is mainly composed of two parts: the turbulence driven by local gradient and the turbulence spreading from core to edge. The development of the estimated turbulence spreading rate is prior to that of the turbulence driving rate. The increase in the turbulence intensity can cause the turbulent Reynold stress and its gradient to increase, thereby enhancing shear flows and radial electric fields. Turbulence spreading leads the edge Reynolds stresses to develop and the shear flow to be faster than edge electron temperature. The Reynolds stress arises from the symmetry breaking of the turbulence wave number spectrum. After sawtooth collapses, the joint probability density function of radial wave number and poloidal wave number of turbulence intensity becomes highly skewed and anisotropic, exhibiting strong asymmetry, which can be seen in attached figures (f) and (g). The development of turbulence spreading flux at the edge is also prior to the particle flux driven by turbulence, indicating that turbulent energy transport is not simply accompanied by turbulent particle transport. These results show that the turbulence spreading and symmetry breaking can enhance turbulent Reynolds stress, thereby driving shear flows, after sawtooth has crashed.