Academic Conversations

Have you ever tried to facilitate student conversations within your classroom and had a result like this?

Student A: “So, what do you think about this?”

Student B: “It was OK.... What about you?”

Student A: “I dunno.”

It’s not exactly an example of clear, thoughtful, or meaningful dialogue. How can teachers help students practice speaking skills?

We attended a conference a couple of weeks ago about how to build students’ capacities to use academic language in the classroom, and particularly how to have clear and meaningful academic conversations about their learning.

Jeff Zwiers talked about how to make academic language accessible to students and provided several specific strategies and activities that would be useful across content areas. The strategies that he talked about are very helpful for EAL learners, but also for all learners in your classes. Here are two of the strategies we learned.

1. Quote Activity (useful as a pre-reading strategy)

- The teacher chooses key quotes from a text that students will read (perhaps 6-8 different quotes).

- Copy the different quotes onto coloured strips of paper.

- Students walk around and meet with students who have different quotes (ie different coloured papers) to talk about their predictions about the text. Sample sentence starters for students are:

“My quote is _________”

“I predict the text will be about ______ because _______”

“ Given the clues I have heard so far such as ______, I think the text will be about _____”

- As students meet with multiple other students, they will hear many quotes and can begin to synthesize other quotes and other students’ predictions into their own predictions.

2. Academic Conversation Placemat

- This is a piece of paper that is in front of students as they are having academic conversations during class. Prompts and sentence starters are written on the placemat to remind students of ways to extend and deepen their conversations.

- The placemat has prompts to help students: elaborate, clarify, paraphrase, synthesize key points, build on ideas, and support ideas with examples.

 I got this file from Jeff Zwier’s website. http://www.jeffzwiers.com/

Check out his website- as he has much to offer in terms of strategies to get students talking!

 Giving EAL students specific prompts and sentence starters is a great way to help them develop their language skills (both written and orally). As an example, I’ve recently given my EAL students a compare/contrast essay assignment. I’ve included sentence starters within each paragraph to give them clues about what to write next. This tool has helped them organize their writing. They are learning how to write an essay, so that at some point in the future they can complete an assignment like this without prompts.