April26

The Forgotten Strand in ELA: Speaking and Listening

Teachers of English know that the standards for language arts include more than literature and writing. We are responsible for language standards of conventions, vocabulary, and grammar as well as speaking and listening learning goals. When I was teaching high school English, our Professional Learning Community (PLC) would often discuss ways to integrate the conventions standards into our teaching of writing to ensure those standards were met. When it came to speaking and listening, however, many of my peers were reluctant. Partly because the idea of giving speeches gave them hives, and partly because they really enjoyed the study of literature in college and found joy in helping students navigate challenging texts. It is natural that we will focus on the areas of ELA in which we feel most confident.

As a speech coach, I not only knew the value of the strand of speaking, listening, and viewing, I also understood that students needed explicit instruction and practice if they were going to master these standards. And since I had benefitted from the confidence I developed in my own speaking skills, I was intent on supporting students as they worked to overcome their own fears.

More than ever, our youth need support in developing their communication skills. Here are three practical ways to intentionally support the forgotten strand of speaking and listening in your ELA classes.

1 Use Talk Moves

Talk moves are tools to help students participate in large and small group discussions effectively and respectfully. Talk moves are essential sentence frames we can provide to our students to help them engage in more rigorous academic discourse.

Providing anchor charts on the wall or bookmarks on the desks can really help students to use talk moves during their conversations. I found this Edutopia video helpful in illustrating how to use these sentence frames with students.

Ideas for facilitating class discussions and for students to use as they participate in large and small group conversations:

To paraphrase: “So you’re saying. . .”

Asking to rephrase: “Can you repeat what you just said?”

To honor revision: “Has anyone’s thinking changed? How so?” “Would you like to revise your thinking?”

To build upon the conversation: “Would someone like to add on to this?”

To allow for thinking/revision: “Take your time. . .” “I’ll come back to you after the next person responds.”

For reasoning: “Do you agree or disagree, and why?” “Why does that make sense?” “What makes you think/say that?”

Sentence frames students can refer to while engaging in small or large group conversation:

To answer: “I have an idea.” “I am thinking . . .”

To make a claim: “My position is. . . because. . .”

To ask for clarification: “Can you explain that again?” “I am not understanding.”

To offer clarification: “I know what ___ means. I believe he is saying. . .” “Another way to say it is. . . ” “I understand. It means. . .”

To build upon the conversation: “When___said___, it made me think about. . .” “I can add. . . ”

To provide support for ideas: “In the text it states. . . ” “I know that to be true because. . .”

2 Teach Active Listening

We can’t assume that our students know how to be active listeners, and we certainly can’t assume that because we said something, that they have internalized our message. It’s critical that we take the time to explicitly teach and model active listening. A few ways of doing this that I found were successful with my middle and high school students included creating a community anchor chart of active listening characteristics, and inviting students to reflect on their practice of listening intently to each other in class.

Early in the term as we were building our norms for our classroom, I asked students to first write about a time when they really felt listened to as well as a time when they felt like the person they were talking to was not actively listening. I encouraged them to go back and read what they wrote and see if they could list what the active listener was doing to show engagement and what the poor listener was doing to show disengagement.

Our anchor charts often looked something like this. While we talked about the poor listeners, we kept the focus of the chart on the characteristics we wanted to see during our discussions and collaborative work.

Active listening takes practice. So, I liked having students pause and reflect on their listening partway through our whole class discussions, turn-and-talks, and small-group work. Simply ask questions like, “Reflect on your body language. Is it communicating active listener?” “How well are you listening right now?” “What might be distracting you and how can you refocus to listen actively?”

3 Get Shakespeare Up on the Stage

When I first started teaching Shakespeare, we would often read out loud in class. I would ask for volunteers to read for certain characters, we would sit in a circle, read part of a scene, and discuss. This worked well when the naturally inclined actors happened to be in my class. If my group were more introverted, it could be quite painful. A couple of years into teaching, I discovered Shakespeare Set Free created by Folger Shakespeare Library. This resource completely changed my thinking around studying Shakespeare. I was reminded that Shakespeare created theatre for all socio-economic groups to enjoy. Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed. The text provides step-by-step instructions for studying one scene through the lens of performance and then helping student groups to choose their own scene to polish for the stage. Each scene would be put together (5-6 each class period) to create a more complete understanding of the play.

I followed the ideas for A Midsummer Night’s Dream closely and in my first year I had students completely engaged in acting, directing, set creating, and performing a scene for their peers and anyone else I could get to the theatre each class period—administrators, other classes, custodians, etc.

When I talk with former students, many tell me that at first, they were nervous about the idea of acting on stage during their sophomore English class, but more so they remember the feelings of accomplishment and joy seeing their finished product entertain so many of their peers. Not only did students master the literature standards for drama, Shakespeare, and complex text, they also worked on speaking and listening standards related to both dramatic performance and small-group collaboration.

There are many more ways we can embrace speaking and listening, and weave the standards into our units of study where our primary focus might be literature or a mode of writing. We just need to be intentional to ensure the strand isn’t forgotten.

AboutJen McCarty Plucker

Jen McCarty Plucker, Ed.D., lead literacy consultant for Mackin Learning has more than 20 years experience in public education. First, as a middle school English and speech teacher, then as a high school English, speech, and literacy intervention teacher. She spent 5 years at the district leadership level integrating inquiry, project based learning, and rich classroom libraries across secondary English, social studies, and science. She is most energized when seeing learners of all ages engaged...totally in their zone.