Teaching through Talking

Everyone knows that children love to talk. They will chat your ear off about what they did over the weekend or what their favorite movie is. It is logical then to employ talking in one's classroom as a means of encouraging dialogue and learning amongst students. Discussions are incredibly useful for literacy activties. This is especially beneficial when reading a text as a class. Each student will make different text-to-self and text-to-text connections that are worth bringing to the class's attention. Additionally, when working with ELLs, discussion allows them to construct a deeper meaning of the text and gives them the opportunity for creating comprehensible output. If the teacher is lecturing or just presenting the students with display questions, the chances for students to produce language are greatly diminished. In Janice Almasi's article, "A New View of Discussion," she states "the reader's interpretation constantly evolves, and the interpretation that each person brings to a discussion may ultimately be transformed and shaped by the thoughts and ideas of other group members" (3).

The types of talk I've seen in my placement's classroom are very superficial. Part of this is due to the lack of confidence that my students have when speaking in their L2 (since it is a Spanish Immersion Program), while part of it is due to how my MT leads the talks. I've rarely seen her read a book that interested the student or had any connection to another activity, such as a follow-up writing extension. Although she clarifies and explains vocabulary so that the students comprehend the story, she doesn't ask them to make predictions or discuss the book afterwards to learn what questions or thoughts the students have. In order for them to have an Almasi-quality discussion, I think my teacher would need to select a book that was a more appropriate length (i.e. shorter) and present students with open-ended questions instead of display. Also, she would need to do a better job of encouraging the more shy students to share their ideas/thoughts/questions. I think the hardest thing for my students would be to bridge the language gap. Having a quality and meaningful discussion when students are hesitant to talk is problematic, as is the fact that most of the time when they do share something with the group, it is a short sentence that consists of very basic vocabulary words. The could undoubtedly expand on these ideas and be more articulate if they were allowed to have a literary discussion in a classroom where speaking English was the norm. If my MT incorporated authentic discussions around texts in our classroom, I hypothesize that the oral proficiency of our students would increase as a result of increased opportunities for production.