Practice and application of new concepts is a known component of learning, but it is all too often overlooked when it comes to language skills. When students are learning English as a second or other language, they need to practice what they are learning — in other words, they need to speak — as much as possible! The good news is, increasing student talk in your classroom benefits all students — not just multilingual learners — and the benefits go far beyond improving language skills. When students talk about what they are learning, they gain a deeper understanding of text, increased motivation, reduced risk, and increased attention (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short, 2017).

Here are six ways to ensure that the teacher isn’t the one doing most of the talking, presented under two big ideas:

→ Firstly, that students benefit when teachers move beyond calling on individual students, and
→ Secondly, students need language supports in order to get the most out of increased talk time in class.

Move Beyond Calling on Individual Students

How often do you call on an individual student to speak in class? The average U.S. K-12 classroom has between 17 and 22 students (U.S. Department of Education). If half of a one-hour class period were devoted to calling on individual students, and every student got the same amount of time to speak, each student would spend less than two minutes talking. At the end of a six-hour school day, each student would have spoken in class for five to ten minutes total. This is not nearly enough speaking time! Furthermore, in most classrooms, that speaking time isn’t divided up equally among all of the students. Many times, students who are still learning English are the ones who need the most practice, but who raise their hands the least often. Instead of relying on calling on individual students for student speaking time, build one of these activities into your lesson to ensure that more students are speaking, and all students are spending more time speaking.

1. Talk to a Partner First

In this activity, when the teacher asks a question, every student turns to a partner and discusses possible responses. Then, when the teacher does call on one student to share out, that student shares either their own idea or their partner’s idea. This activity greatly increases the number of students who get to speak after the teacher asks a question, and it allows students to share and hear different ideas. This routine works best with open-ended questions and/or higher-order thinking questions (which are also likely to elicit the most speech). This activity also allows students to practice their answer in a low-risk environment, with their partner, before sharing it with the whole group, which is especially important for multilingual learners.

2. Classroom Conversation Protocol

A common discourse pattern in K-12 classrooms, called initiation-response-feedback (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), has three parts: the teacher asks a question (initiation), one student responds (response), and then the teacher tells them if they are correct or not (feedback). This not only elicits a minimal amount of student speech, but it also precludes more meaningful discourse moves such as building on someone else’s comments, expanding on an idea, or supporting a statement with evidence from the text. As an alternative to initiation-response-feedback, a classroom conversation protocol elicits more speaking, more critical thinking, and more complex sentences from students. For example, a classroom conversation protocol might include the following steps:

  • The teacher asks a question or proposes a topic.
  • One student responds.
  • Another student either adds onto the first response, provides a different response, or provides text evidence that supports or refutes the first response.
  • A third student either compares the two responses given so far, adds onto them, or explains why they agree/disagree with one or both.

If this is a new routine in your classroom, you will need to introduce the steps in the protocol, post them in the classroom for students to see, and remind students of the steps the first few times you implement it. It might also help to provide students with sentence frames for each of their response options, such as “I agree with what ___ said, and I’d like to add….” or “In contrast to what ___ said, the author states….” You can find many more sentence frames by searching “accountable talk” (Skelton & Hyunh, n.d.) or “classroom discourse sentence starters.”

3. Test Talk

This idea was shared by math instructor Howie Hua on his TikTok page (Hua, 2024) as a way to incorporate more student collaboration on test days. While the test itself is done individually, students have five minutes to collaborate with each other, orally, before they begin writing. First, students place their writing utensils on the floor or otherwise out of reach. Then, the teacher passes out the test. Before retrieving their pencils and getting to work, students have five minutes to discuss the test with their peers. Mr. Hua reports that he hears “some of the best mathematical conversations” during those five minutes!

Provide Language Supports

While oral language practice facilitates students’ language development, just prompting students to speak more isn’t sufficient, especially for multilingual learners. In addition to high expectations, students need adequate support to enable them to meet those expectations. Here are some ways to think about the language supports you provide in your classroom.

4. Vocabulary

Provide students with the vocabulary you want them to use in classroom conversations. This includes content-specific vocabulary (usually highlighted in your teaching materials as “key vocabulary”), but also the general academic vocabulary that students will need to engage in classroom conversations. For example, when asking students to compare and contrast two or more things, provide them with a list of words that are used to compare and contrast: same, similar, different, but, on the other hand, however, and nevertheless. You can find similar lists of general academic words by searching for “signal words” plus the specific task you want students to engage in (describe, cause and effect, sequence, etc.) As a bonus, you can point out that these words can also signal an author’s purpose in a text, which aids reading comprehension.

5. Sentence Frames

Another language support you can provide to students to help them engage in more classroom discussions is sentence frames, also called sentence starters or sentence stems. The goal here is to help students — especially multilingual learners — focus their energy on the content you are teaching, while providing them with practice using the language relevant to that content. For example, when students are making and justifying claims in a science class, the sentence frame “One example that supports this claim is ….” allows the student to focus on finding an example to justify the claim; multilingual learners using the sentence frame don’t have to spend time trying to put a sentence together to express their thoughts. At the same time, students who use the sentence frame are learning and practicing language, which will empower them to justify claims in social studies, math, and English language arts class as well.

6. Model Classroom Conversations for Students

Students who are learning English benefit greatly from seeing an example of the kind of written text the teacher would like them to produce; the same is true of oral language. In addition to providing students with the vocabulary and sentence frames they can use to engage in classroom discussion, it can sometimes be helpful to show students a complete conversation. Teachers can play video or audio recordings of model conversations, or have volunteer students demonstrate a conversation in front of the whole class. In either case, the conversation should model the vocabulary, sentence structures, content, length, and complexity that the teacher expects to see students producing when engaged in classroom conversations.

In every classroom, students who engage in more talk about the lesson content will deepen their understanding of the content and retain that learning longer (Alexander, 2013). For multilingual learners who are learning English alongside the lesson’s content, oral language practice is essential. Try one of these techniques, or ask your colleagues what activities they use to get students talking.

Ready to transform your school into a place where multilingual learners are seen, heard, and empowered? Click here to join the movement.

References