Conversation time in world language classes

At the high school where I teach, my colleagues and I stand in the hallways to monitor the transition of students from one grade to the next. The children try to have as many conversations as possible in the four minutes between the bells. Because we are a Bilingual Immersion (DLI) school, these exchanges take place in Spanish, English, and many creative blends of both. To take advantage of my students’ (seemingly inexhaustible) desire to chat, I am working to increase student speaking time during our Spanish immersion classes. I use a variety of strategies to build and assess students’ oral language.

Increasing student speech in the classroom is important for student engagement and developing thinking. As Shana Frazin and Katy Wischow explain in Unlocking the power of classroom conversationsdiscussion time creates community and allows students to process challenging content. In my classroom, talk also acts as a bridge between the varieties of Spanish and English that students use in social settings and the varieties in which they read, for example, a higher Lexile CommonLit text on Lin-Manuel Miranda or a social studies mini-Q on Hammurabi’s code. Students contact each other and ask questions like “¿Qué significa homenaje?” or “How do you say that honestly in Spanish?”

I also encourage talking in my classroom because the language production of students in our district helps them earn high school credits. When students purposefully practice speaking in class, they will be prepared to put their best foot forward on challenging ACTFL-based assessments, which measure students’ proficiency in world languages. In other words, students’ performance on these assessments leads to tangible benefits for them.

Building dedicated speaking time into every lesson can be simple and low-commitment. One of my students’ favorite activities is a conversation-based warm-up. I project a quote or image, and then students use dice and numbered conversation cards to discuss it. As students roll the dice, they try out different academic language frames. For example, if they roll a three, their job is to ask a question using the sentence frame: ‘¿Puedes explicar…?” / “Can you explain…?” The dice make talking feel like a game. Students can track points to compete individually or in groups.

I also like to use movement games because middle schoolers are wobbly. For a formative assessment at the end of the lesson, we start with standing. One student starts with a ball and shares a word from the class (for example, vocabulary or an important concept). Once they have shared, they toss the ball to another classmate and then sit down to show that they have participated. Students need to listen actively because they cannot repeat what their classmates have already said. This ball throw is infinitely customizable and doesn’t even require standing or a ball. The same formative assessment could be conducted with students sitting at their desks and marking their participation with a red or green card.

Once I notice that my students feel comfortable responding out loud to substantive questions, I experiment with different conversation routines. Socratic Seminary, or “Pilots”, as we call it in our DLI classes, is one of my favorites. We often use it as a formative assessment of topics related to the essential questions of a unit (for example, “How has Islam influenced Africa?” or “How can we use artifacts to learn about a civilization?”). This activity requires a full 45-minute class period with my seventh graders, and I see the most improvement when we practice once or twice a quarter. These are the essential components of our seminars:

1. I encourage students to be the first “pilot” (or speaker) for their group by asking the clearest questions in the first round. As students become more comfortable with the seminar topic, they will be prepared to respond to the more analytical questions that come in later rounds. For us, the sweet spot is usually two or three rounds of questions.
2. Students focus their answers primarily on me, but this activity works best when students are talking to each other. Over the course of the school year, I teach students to communicate student-to-student rather than student-to-teacher by reminding them to look at their peers when they talk and to try to respond to what their classmates have said. rather than just adding new ideas.
3. I have the Universal Design for Learning principle of multiple modes of engagement during Socratic seminars. Students can take on many roles, from quietly following the conversation or writing a reflection on what they hear to verbally discussing ideas with a team of three or with the whole group.

There have been a number of hurdles in assessing students’ language production in my classes. First, speech is spontaneous, so judgments are usually made in the moment. (I learned the hard way that reviewing 48 two-minute recordings is during my little prep time no fun.) Additionally, judging language can feel subjective, so the criteria should be clear. An easy way to check this is to have the students listen to a few speaking examples with me before we start the activity and then do a five-point skills rubric to determine how we would rate each one. If our scores are equal, the rubric is sufficiently understandable and reliable. If not, we will revise the rubric together.

When we practice oral language in class, I notice that engagement becomes more visible and the lesson feels more fun. Students encourage each other to speak while I step back. There are also cross-disciplinary benefits that come from our structured practice, including greater attention to detail. When students know that part of their grade comes from providing multiple reasons to support their opinions, they rise to the occasion and do their best to meet the requirements.

For example, when asked how the spread of Islam changed Africa, students initially respond with simple answers, such as “Islam changed the culture of Africa.” When they understand that they are responsible for providing reasons to support their answers, they express more complex ideas, such as “Islam changed the culture of Africa because it influenced the types of art in mosques, as we see in the images in saw the textbook. ” As we strive to increase students’ oral language skills, my advice is to think of our classrooms as laboratories. We can experiment with different strategies to build and assess students’ conversations to discover what works best.