Oral Language Development

Throughout the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), students are expected to demonstrate adequate mastery of academic speaking and listening skills. How do you encourage students’ aural comprehension and language development in your classroom? What resources, opportunities, and examples can students access in your classroom to continue expanding on content area knowledge while also developing their academic English and aural comprehension skills?

There is good news for educators: in the internet age, aural skill development activities can be easily accessed online. By including aural skill-building activities in your lessons, you can encourage academic language growth, increase background knowledge, enable students to refine listening skills, and model the use of formal academic language. Integrating listening activities into classroom lessons is especially helpful to encourage academic language growth for EL students at the intermediate level and above.

One great resource for educators is Listenwise. The Listenwise website hosts hundreds of curated public radio stories, podcasts, and lessons, with topics ranging from current events and history to science and language arts. Many stories include additional materials, such as tiered vocabulary lists, interactive vocabulary games, transcripts, reduced-speed audio, standards-aligned lesson plans, and graphic organizers for active listening.

To learn more about academic listening skills in the Common Core, visit the speaking and listening standards for each grade level on the CCSS English and Language Arts standards website.

How do you mix up your lessons and units to make sure all students have the opportunity to practice active listening and speaking?

• For EL students, speaking and listening in group activities can be challenging, since other more confident students often monopolize active speaking time and contributions to the group. During lesson planning, it’s important to consider how you can provide safe spaces for all to share ideas and contribute to lessons. Luckily, there are already many effective techniques that you can use in your lessons to better enable all students to refine their listening, speaking, and group work skills. A wonderful example is the “Save the Last Word for Me” activity, which balances students' contributions in group work by encouraging them to actively listen and contribute, giving them the opportunity to think aloud, respond, and interact with ideas. “Save the Last Word for Me” can be used across all grade levels and English skill levels, and can be adapted to work with text, images, or even film and audio samples.

For a closer look at “Save the Last Word for Me,” plus some thoughts on using it in your classroom, visit the activity outline from Facing History.

Recent studies have explored the complex relationship between students’ oral language skills and their reading and lexical identification skills. Several of these studies have shown that EL students and native English speaking students can perform at the same level of accuracy in basic reading skills, word recognition, and reading efficiency despite the differences in oral language proficiencies (Geva et al., 2000; Gottardo et al., 2001; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003; Geva & Zadeh, 2006).  The studies have highlighted the fact that while EL students do rely heavily upon oral language skills to contribute to their understanding of literary grammatical structures and vocabulary, EL students also depend on other processing constructs such as phonological awareness, recall processes, and well-developed word recognition skills to assist in reading efficiency (Geva & Yaghoub Zadeh, 2006).

Working to prepare lessons and units that present students with the opportunity to develop oral language skills alongside literacy skills is critically important for students to continue to refine and hone their English language skills.

Want to read more? Check out this article from Geva & Yaghoub Zadeh for a more detailed look at these studies and what their findings might mean for you and your classroom!

Resources

Geva, E., Yaghoub Zadeh, Z., & Schuster, B. (2000). Understanding individual differences in word recognition skills of ESL children. Annals of Dyslexia, 50, 123–154.

Geva, E.,  & Yaghoub Zadeh, Z. (2006). Reading efficiency in native English speaking and English-as-a-second language children: The role of oral proficiency and underlying cognitive-linguistic processes. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(1), 31-57.

Gottardo, A., Yan, B., Siegel, L. S., & Wade-Woolley, L. (2001). Factors related to English reading performance in children with Chinese as a first language: More evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological processing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 530–542

Lesaux, N., & Siegel, L. S. (2003). The development of reading in children who speak English as a second language (ESL). Developmental Psychology, 39, 1005–1019.

Academic oral English is a key component of language acquisition by ELs. By developing academic oral language, students build vocabulary and interact with complex texts, both of which are essential first steps for building understanding of language form and function. In the past, oral language development was viewed as a fairly passive process—one that occurred naturally as students spent more time in a rigorous classroom environment. In reality, though, oral language is a skill that students need to learn and practice intentionally.

Choral reading is a great strategy to use with students in the early learning stages. Students work in pairs or small groups to perform a text for their classmates, who can either listen or read along with the text. Because all group members are reading the same passage aloud together, lower-proficiency students are more comfortable and do not need to worry about making mistakes. Moreover, the collective nature of choral reading requires students to navigate and practice important oral language skills such as pronunciation, intonation, diction and fluency. 

Want to try choral reading with your students? To get started, check out this resource from Reading Rockets.

And, if you are concerned about successfully implementing oral language activities in a mainstream classroom that includes both native English speakers and ELs, take a look at this insightful discussion from Colorín Colorado, which examines challenges and solutions for multi-level classrooms.

Research suggests that learning and providing students with opportunities to recast, or further articulate what they have learned in their own way, can be linked (Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Alexander, 2006). Studies have also found that implementing approaches such as the think-pair-share strategy, in which students further articulate their thinking and learning with peers, can help learners to develop the communication skills that are necessary for internal processing, organization, and retention of core content instruction (Pimm, 1987).

Instruction that accounts for these types of interaction can be even more beneficial in EL classrooms because they allow ELs time to process their thoughts, engage in critical thinking with their peers, take advantage of extra time or prompting they may need, and gain confidence when reporting ideas to the larger class. You can learn more about the think-pair-share strategy and EL instruction here.

While the think-share-pair strategy is an integral part of certain sheltered instruction models, there are many variations of it. Check out this link for new ideas on how to mix up your classroom activities and tailor your think-pair-share activities to meet the language demands of the Common Core State Standards.

Effective command of vocabulary requires that students not only use words correctly, but also that they flexibly define those words. It can sometimes be difficult to encourage students to move beyond memorization in order to develop mastery of word usage and meaning.

An effective classroom game that can encourage EL participation is Taboo. In the game, one student sits on a “hot seat” facing their class or their team. Behind them, the teacher holds up a card with a word on it. The group of students must give their hot seat team member hints to guess the word without using the word itself. This scenario can also be reversed: one student could give hints so that their team can guess a word. For added difficulty, the teacher can specify additional words that cannot be used—for example, if the word to be guessed is “dog,” some of the additional forbidden words could be “puppy” or “hound.” In these ways, the activity encourages students to think laterally and use synonyms and definitions.

To view one version of the Taboo classroom game, visit the Internet TESL Journal.

How do you work to include all voices into your classroom discussions and lessons? What tools and strategies do you use to encourage students to question and engage with the instructional content and material? 

For many EL students, especially those still in the earlier stages of English language learning, participating and asking questions in the classroom can be an intimidating process. Often times lessons and units require students to produce and answer questions orally and in the moment, this process relies on students comprehending the background knowledge around the topic and the presented material, as well as assumes that students are able to formulate and develop their responses on the spot. For many ELs participating in these activities can cause immense anxiety as the challenges they face are actually twofold.

In order to provide a more open format for reacting to lessons, a great tool you can use in your classroom is the graffiti board. This is a whiteboard, chalkboard, or large sheet of paper located somewhere in the classroom that students can use to help share ideas, questions, and engage with the classroom material in whatever way they feel confident (e.g. written, pictorially, etc.).  Graffiti boards can be guided, for example, what was one thing you learned about the modern Olympics, or can be free form allowing students to direct the conversation through the sharing of their thoughts and questions. Additional scaffolding could be included for ELs, for example providing sentence stems as a starting place. The graffiti board allows students ample time to process, engage, and formulate their responses to the lesson and can help students also engage with the presented material collectively. They can also be used to introduce a topic, activating prior knowledge and organizing ideas before beginning a lesson. Graffiti boards should be reviewed as a class, as any questions or thoughts are shared and discussed.

For a closer look at how this activity might look as well as some of the steps you can take to incorporate this teaching strategy into your classroom activities, check out this article from Facing History and Ourselves. 

Did you know that research has shown that there is a positive relationship between students’ oral English proficiency and students’ English reading and writing development. Despite the fact that we have long known the importance of creating opportunities for students to develop oral language skills, research suggests that in most classrooms teachers do from 65 to 95 percent of the talking. Working to create a classroom setting that balances both teacher-speak and student-speak, sometimes known as instructional conversations, is important in student acquisition of new vocabulary and linguistic structures.  Creating these opportunities for students to practice and develop their oral skills either in pairs, group work or well-structured classroom discussions, can have positive educational effects well beyond students’ oral language skills.  

For a further look at the instructional conversation model check out this article!

 Resources

August, D. & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: A report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. New York: Heinemann.

Geva, E. (2006). Second-language oral proficiency and second-language literacy. In D. August and T Shanahan (Eds.). Developing literacy in second-language learners: A report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Numan, D. (2005). Classroom research. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 225-240). Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilen, W. (1990). Forms and phases of discussion. In W. Wilen (Ed.), Teaching and learning through discussion (pp. 3-24). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Interaction is key to creating a classroom in which students are actively engaged with content, therefore promoting diverse opportunities for students to develop oral language. Research suggests that interactive instructional approaches in which student-talk and teacher-talk are more balanced, are a more effective means of fostering meaningful language learning opportunities for English learners.

Echevarría, Vogt and Short also highlight seven learner benefits resulting from learning through engagement and student interaction.

1)     Interaction promotes deeper understanding of texts and resources

Conversations promote new and deeper understanding of presented materials  because they invite students to question, explain, and interact with content.  A key strategy teachers might use to promote meaningful interaction in the classroom is using guided questions that explore texts, encourage students to go beyond surface-level facts, or plot points that advance students’ more in-depth and creative thinking through a text or passage. 

2)     Interaction promotes oral language development

Paired or group work in the classroom allows student interaction among varying language backgrounds and levels of English proficiency. By encouraging structured and meaningful interaction opportunities in your classroom, teachers support students’ practice and development of speaking skills by allowing them to learn from each other.  

3)    Interaction promotes brain stimulation

Providing interactive and engaging activities like discussions, plays, or group work, not only promotes in-depth content learning, it also triggers more pleasure structures in the brain, resulting in more activate cognitive engagement.

4)     Interaction promotes increased motivation in students

Research has shown that interaction, particularly in reading instruction, plays an important role in the learning process, which not only increases content comprehension, but also student motivation.

 5)     Interaction reduces the feeling of risk in the classroom

Students, especially ELs, can often feel intimidated or nervous when they are called on to answer questions aloud to the rest of the class, particularly when they have not had the opportunity to prepare an answer, respond, or ask questions. By allowing students to work in pairs or small groups, teachers lower “the risk” students may feel while both asking and answering questions.

6)     Interaction provides students with more processing time.

Paired or group work gives students more time to process content presented in both oral and written form. Interactive methods also allow students the time to develop the questions and find answers that assist in comprehension of language and content.

7)     Interactive techniques increase student attention.

Paired or group work also functionally diversify instruction, therefore providing students with opportunities to both speak, as well as listen to each other while collectively working through assignments.

There are many benefits of incorporating interactive methods into your instruction. Student interaction also creates an environment that helps all students use and develop their language skills!  

Resources 

Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom discourse : The language of teaching and learning. New York: Heinemann.

Echevarría, J., Vogt, M.E. & Short, D.J. (2013). Making content comprehensible for English learners: The SIOP® model (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Gutherie, J.T., & Ozgungor, S. (2002). In C.C. Block * M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices. New York: Guliford Press. 

Jensen, E. (2008). Brain-based learning, (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. 

McIntyre, E., Kyle, D., Chen, C., Muñoz, M. & Beldon, S. (2010). Teacher learning and ELL reading achievement in sheltered instruction classrooms: Linking professional development to student development. Literacy Research and Instruction, 49(4), 334-351. 

Poldrack, R., Clark, J., Pare-Blagoev, E., Shohamy, D., Creso Moyano, J., Myers, C., & Gluck, M. (2001). Interactive memory systems in the human brain. Nature, 414, 546-550. 

Saunders, W. & Goldenberg, C. (2010). Research to guide English language development instruction. In California Department of Education (Ed.), Improving education for English learners: Research-based approaches (pp. 21-81). Sacramento, CA:CDE Press. 

Walaqui, A. (2006). Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual framework. The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(2), 159-180. 

Still looking for ways to kick-start the New Year and set new goals for your EL students? Consider developing lessons and classroom activities that encourage students to increase language production by providing varied opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction.

Research suggests that interactive classrooms, in which there is a balance between both teacher and student talk, are particularly effective in promoting language development, especially for EL students. Creating meaningful opportunities for students to use and develop oral language skills is a critical part of students’ advancing both academic and conversational language.

Oral language exchanges and group work also allow for informal assessment of student comprehension and learning. Teachers can use peer-to-peer work not only to check if students are understanding content area information, but also to see how they are using language, especially in terms of the challenges they may face in some areas such as vocabulary or form.

For a look at some practical exercises you can incorporate into your classroom lessons, check out this article.

Or, for a sample lesson idea that involves literacy, as well as oracy, check out this helpful description of Reader’s Theater, complete with a sample lesson video!

During your content area instruction, are you enabling students to develop oral language skills?

Oral language skills are critical for the academic development of all students, and especially ELs. Traditional instruction, involving large amounts of instruction by the teacher with little opportunity for student input or discussion, does not sufficiently enable students to engage with the subject matter or practice the skills, vocabulary, and content they have learned. Yet EL students require structured repetition and redundancy to connect concepts and ideas, as well as engage with vocabulary and oral language skills. Research suggests that when teachers include recurring structured and supported opportunities to improve oral language skills, ELs are more likely to continue to persist in using English and will show greater proficiency (Saunders & Goldenberg, 2009).

It does not have to be a challenge to design lessons that provide meaningful opportunities for oral language development. In fact, a simple way to get started is by closely evaluating and modifying the way you question and interact with students during class.

In our lessons, we often ask students to provide a simple, direct answer—one that can be expressed in a single word or short sentence. However, this approach often leaves classroom talk unbalanced, resulting in a situation where the instructor does the vast majority of the talking while students listen. To re-balance classroom speaking, try using cues and prompts that encourage students to continue speaking and developing their thoughts. These cues and prompts not only provide instructors with valuable insights on student learning and comprehension, but also give students valuable opportunities to further develop ideas, apply vocabulary, and express themselves out loud. Zwiers (2008, pp. 62-63) has compiled an excellent list of prompts you can use in your classroom to help students engage with content and oral language skills: 

To Prompt More Thinking

● You are on to something important. Keep going.

● You are on the right track. Tell us more.

● There is no right answer, so what would be your best answer?

● What did you notice about . . .

To Fortify or Justify a Response

● That’s a good probable answer . . . How did you get to that answer?

● Why is what you said so important?

● What is your opinion (impression) of . . . Why?

 To See Other Points of View

● That’s a great start. Keep thinking and I’ll get back to you.

● If you were in that person’s shoes, what would you have done?

● Would you have done (or said) it like that? Why or why not?

To Consider Consequences

● Should she have . . .?

● What if he had not done that?

● Some people think that . . . is [wrong, right, and so on]. What do you think? Why?

● How can we apply this to real life?

Do you already use any of these questions? What other questions do you use to promote oral language development? If you have not yet considered which questions you ask as an instructor, try using some of these suggestions to see what happens to the discussions and student speaking in your classroom!