I have a great aunt who can talk to anyone…I mean anyone.  She once called the telephone operator to ask for the exact time and ended up talking to her for more than thirty minutes!  I don’t know if this story is actually true or just family lore, but the point is humans have an intrinsic desire to communicate with others.

I’ve written about my philosophy regarding authenticity on other blog posts (see The ‘Barnes and Noble’ Effect).  I am all about providing students with opportunities that mirror the behaviors of real readers and writers.  One such behavior is the need to verbally process information with others.

How many times have you finished reading a book and had an urgent need to discuss its contents with a fellow reader?  What about instances when you have asked for feedback or input on a piece of your writing?  It’s natural to want to talk with others.  If this is true, then let’s consider what this looks like in the classroom.

I read a recent tweet about how administrators can better communicate with teachers…”Listen more, talk less.  Two ears, one mouth for a reason.”  I chuckled when I read it, but what a powerful statement wrapped up in eleven words!  SO powerful, in fact, that I think it can be generalized to other scenarios…like the classroom.  What if we challenged ourselves to talk half as much as we listened?  What if we provided more opportunities throughout the day for students to talk…to the class, to each other, to a small group, to us?  There’s plenty of research that supports the importance of giving students ample time to talk in an effort to propel their learning forward.

Within the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to hear Sharon Taberski speak at a state sponsored professional development conference.   Of the many ideas she presented, I was most intrigued when she spoke about the significance of oral language development.  She shared the quote, “Oral language sets the ceiling on comprehension.”  I’ve given a great deal of thought about the meaning of this and finally landed on the following:  If our ultimate goal is to teach students to comprehend proficiently…then we must provide them with plenty of time to talk.  In order for children to comprehend the texts they read, the language of the text must be familiar to them.  The only way to become familiar with language is to use it…

In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley published Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young America Children.  In this landmark study, Hart and Risley found an approximate 30 million (yes, I said, 30 MILLION!) word gap between three year olds from professional families and those from welfare families.  This study proved two things: 1) Quantity matters.  The more language a child hears, the more developed his/her oral vocabulary will become.  2) Quality matters.  Not only did children from professional families hear more spoken words than children from welfare families, but the language they heard was elaborative rather than restrictive.  (For more information specifically related to this study, check out the Reading Rockets Webcast From Babbling to Books).

So what does a study about three year olds have to do with oral language opportunities in the elementary school classroom?  Well…everything!  Those three year olds will one day be in your kindergarten, first, and second grade classrooms.  If we generalize the results of this study, we can make the assumption that the 30 million word gap that existed at age three has probably increased.  What’s more, Sharon Taberski states in her book Comprehension From the Ground Up, “…here’s the sad irony.  In our current educational climate, we teachers, tired and stressed from all the curricular demands we’ve been handed in the name of raising students’ test scores and reaching prescribed benchmarks, resort all too often to the very same restrictive language practices that occur in less advantaged socioeconomic households.”

How can we transform our classrooms into language rich spaces where the teacher talks less and the students talk more?  Consider implementing the ‘Think-Turn-Talk” strategy.  Julie Adams (@adamsteaching) recently tweeted, “Get rid of hand-raising!  If it’s important enough to ask then ALL should turn and talk about it.”  I agree Julie!  You can turn your students from passive listeners into active (and accountable) participators by indentifying times to implement ‘Think-Turn-Talk’ throughout your day.  Sharon Taberski offers some insight on how to make ‘Think-Turn-Talk’ a highly effective teaching and learning time. You can read page 187 of her book for more specifics, but here’s a quick run-down:

  • Give it time: Instead of squeezing your read aloud time into a 10 or 15 minute chunk of time, plan for a longer time slot.  Give yourself over to the book and to the talk that surrounds the text.  Encourage student talk by asking them to ‘say more’.
  • Identify stopping points: Before beginning a lesson, identify several places that you will stop to ask students to ‘Think-Turn-Talk’.  Use post-its as reminders if you need to.  Select stopping points that encourage your students to ponder their own thinking and to consider what is happening in the text/lesson you are teaching.
  • Ask substantive questions: Instead of asking surface questions, ask ones that encourage deeper thinking.  ‘Why’ and ‘How’ questions lead to deeper conversations than ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’, and ‘When’ questions.
  • Let one response lead to another related one: Try to encourage student comments that play off of one another rather than allowing kids to share thoughts unrelated to the last speaker.  Sitting in a circle is an effective way to encourage this type of dialogue.
  • Realize its potential: Instead of implementing ‘Think-Turn-Talk’ because you’ve heard it’s an effective classroom practice, acknowledge the potential that it has in preparing students for participating in other literacy related learning activities like literature circles and preparing written responses to text.  They learn a great deal when they have opportunities to verbalize their own thinking and when they hear the thinking of others.
  • Perhaps most importantly: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to hear from every student during ‘Think-Turn-Talk’.  Sometimes it’s enough for your students to have time to share their thinking with a partner or small group.

Talking might be one of the most natural human behaviors.  If my dear old aunt Joanne can find content to fill thirty minutes of time while talking to a perfect stranger, I’m encouraged by the potential conversations that might happen in your classroom.  Give your students the ‘gift of gab…’  It might be one of the most effective teaching tools you employ!