The Power of Talk

One of my professional goals this year is to establish valuable oral language tasks for my ELL learners.  In the past I have used specific guidelines to generate and maintain conversations such as using well know prompts like: “Can you repeat what he/she said? Do you agree/disagree? etc”. Although these prompts are still useful, I have begun to further increase the level of language during oral language tasks by focusing on scaffolding questions. The framework I have followed this past week was Bloom’s taxonomy.

I decided to search for a video clip to activate their background knowledge, a key first step in generating conversation.  Since it was the week of the Terry Fox Run, I found a great video clip at EnglishCentral.com.  The first view of the video provided students with some key vocabulary within the clip and simple entry points for discussion.

My planning involved a week or so discussing the following critical questions:

1. Remembering/Understanding : Who is Terry Fox?
2. Applying and Analyzing: How would you describe Terry Fox?
3. Evaluating: What were the benefits of the Terry Fox Run? What were the disadvantages?
4. Creating: If you were to meet Terry Fox today, what questions would you ask him?

My vast experience working with ELL learners has encouraged me to incorporate words and phrases repeatedly over time in order for students to begin using these words in their expressive vocabulary.  Depending on where they fall in their Stage, Stage 1 and Stage 2  ELL learners usually have some Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) but require time to develop their Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP).  My recognition of this development highlights the one necessary component, time.

What I planned for 4 days of discussion actually took 7 days. The oral tasks were planned to be 5-10 minutes but they actually lasted 15-20. Each task increased their level of thinking but also encouraged them to use new vocabulary, and demonstrate CALP.  Repeated exposure to these words during oral sharing sessions and focused guided questions during each oral task guided students to use better word choice in subsequent shared reading and writing tasks.

My reflection on the oral language tasks has helped to further recognize the power of structured oral language tasks in increasing student’s oral language development. I will continue to use these structured approaches to push language development and thinking skills.