Going Beyond 'Turn & Talk': Academic Conversations for Language Learners (Featuring Confianza’s Paraphrasing Partners)

Three students talking outside at a school.

by Sarah Ottow, Founder of Confianza and Author of “The Language Lens for Content Classrooms Guidebook”

A lot of my time as a coach supporting schools is spent observing teachers and providing targeted feedback to help boost language development for their language learners—both multilingual learners and ALL learners (Academic Language Learners).  I also train and coach school leaders to more effectively evaluate teachers.  In both cases, educators often wonder why their students’ oral language isn't where they want it to be when they are using the infamous strategy of turn and talk.

We all know that student talk versus teacher talk is an important starting place for allowing students to practice language more.  Reflecting on how many minutes per class students get to use language meaningfully is also a touchstone for how student-centered our instruction is in general (think less of the traditional 'transmission-based' method of teaching and more cooperative and constructivist).  When we simply keep track how much time we allow students to actually produce language (output) versus how much time we instruct them directly (input), we often realize that we are talking more than our students!  The question I often ask educators in this situation is, How can we expect our students to accelerate their language when they don't really get to use it?  And furthermore, How can we expect our students to use language if we don't provide appropriate supports to do so?

One common way to get students to talk more is to use 'turn and talk'.  I see a lot of teachers instructing their students to 'turn and talk' about this and about that.  And in many many cases, students turn to each other not quite knowing what to do.  They might utter some phrases or words, perhaps some short sentences.  One student might dominate the interaction.  Or both might be completely silent or one may wonder aloud, "What do we talk about?"  The intention here is a positive one--getting students to talk more--Hooray!  However, the impact doesn't quite hit the mark.  We need to go beyond turn and talk to model, support and expect deeper conversations using extended discourse across all content areas.  We need to structure oral language interactions more explicitly for authentic, language-rich instruction.  How do we do that?

What I tell teachers and leaders is to please consider what your expectations are and then to plan supports carefully for students to reach those goals. Language objectives can really help us focus here.  If our expectations are that we want students to explain the difference between mitosis and meiosis, do they know how to compare and contrast?  Do teachers know what’s required to engage in the language function of compare/contrast? (Learn more about language objectives and functions here.) If we want students to discuss the causes of the civil war, do they know how to synthesize and refer to evidence in doing so?  And backing way up, if we expect students to look eye-to-eye and engage in active listening, do they know how to do that?  There is so much involved in interactive discussions, and like any classroom procedure, this needs to be modeled and practiced.  And reflected upon.  And practiced again.  And again.


Academic conversations can create the conditions and to provide the tools for students to go beyond turn and talk into deeper discourse.  Academic conversations, when implemented thoughtfully, teaches students the language of specific functions of academic language across the content areas.  If students are taught how to explain, infer, summarize, paraphrase, inquire, the list goes on...then they are much more likely to do so successfully, using the language (and content) we want them to use.  In schools where the common, systemic expectation is structured yet authentic conversations, I see high levels of student engagement, rich oral language production, and more efficacious teachers (and leaders!)  Here is a strategy we created at Confianza, called Paraphrasing Partners, to deepen learning and academic discourse. We use it in our professional learning and promote it in the classroom too! Start by modeling this partner activity using the language function of paraphrase. Then add other more advanced language functions like agree/disagree, challenge others’ ideas, evaluate, synthesize, support ideas with evidence, etc.

When I was teaching K-12 students, I found paraphrasing to be invaluable to be sure students not only understood instructions but, of course, key content as well! Now, in my work supporting the professional development of educators, I model “Paraphrasing Partners” in workshops and coaching to stress how important it is for ALL learners to “chunk and chew” any information. Recent student feedback on this activity has included, “I like this activity because I can correct my errors with my classmates.” and “I was nervous and excited at the same time.” We, as teachers/facilitators, need to check for understanding throughout instruction so using this kind of student discourse check allows us a break, putting the oneness on students. After all, shouldn’t they be doing the bulk of the work anyways?!

Be cognizant, however, that many nuanced non-verbal cues of academic conversations that we may expect can differ for many of our learners from various cultural backgrounds. For example, in some Asian cultures, making eye contact could be considered disrespectful as the cultural norm is to cast eyes downward as a sign of respect. Plus, from collectivist cultures, putting oneself in the spotlight is not the norm and may be uncomfortable. We don’t want to misconstrue students’ other non-verbal communication signs nor discount them. So one piece of advice is to make our expectations clear while honoring our bicultural, multicultural students’ ways of communication. Plus focus around language functions to keep the focus clear.

Watch Confianza Founder & Director Sarah Ottow share strategies to boost student participation during online learning below.

  • Okay, welcome everybody. I'd like to formally welcome people who are joining us in the chat, on the archive or inLive on Facebook or on our website at ELLstudents.com. So excited to have you all here today.

    The topic is a hot one, which I'm hearing constantly from teachers that I coach and I experienced it in my own practice as I'm gonna be sharing today, which is how do we get students to boost their discourse? And discourse is back and forth conversation between students. How do we get them engaged online? How do we get them into the instruction, feeling valued, feeling part of everything that we're doing especially in this new environment. So let's dive into this topic and to frame the work, I'd like to just talk about a framework that I use in my book called "The Language Lens in Content Classrooms."

    And this idea, first of all that we're all language learners, right? So our students who are multilingual, coming in with other language backgrounds, they're English language learners or bilingual students or multilingual students. And that's really important to target those students with specific scaffolds based on their needs and their strengths. However, we also have academic language learners which are all learners who are learning the academic language of different aspects across the school.

    I myself, as a first generation college graduate in my family, definitely academic language learner in high school going, to college, filling out financial aid. So many things that I learned and continue to learn because we're never fully done learning language. But I'd like to just frame that around ELLs and ALLs, that high tides lifts all boats to support a language-rich classroom. However, English learners still need own their own specific supports based on their specific individual needs.

    At the same time, we really wanna think about how multilingual is the new mainstream. That's what I like to say, because we're working in schools that are more multilingual, more multicultural, more multiracial, more multinational, more multi-abled, more multi-class than ever before. So we really need to change the way that we value diversity and that we really bring in language as an asset, no matter what we teach. Because no matter what we teach, we are all language teachers.

    So when we're thinking about English language learners we wanna keep in mind the levels of language acquisition. And these are universal and these are across every single ELD framework that exists, whether you're using ELPA21 or WIDA, or you're doing the Texas Framework or the New York Framework, wherever you are in the US or internationally, these are the same levels. So they get labeled a little different in different frameworks, but what's important is the process. So the process grows students' language and the book, I go way, way more into depth into these levels.

    But for our purposes today I wanted to frame the work around this idea that we're all language learners and then English language learners have their own process that we need to be aware of and definitely be supporting and scaffolding them. So one way to think about student discourse, as I said, is back and forth. Who's doing the talking? Is it student to teacher only or is it student to student or is it both?

    Because that's really important, that it's not just students answering the teacher but students are talking to each other. So we're gonna talk about some tips for that, and this is a very simple place to start to say where are we now, if you analyze your own practice you might realize, you know, I actually have more teacher talk then student talk.

    In my lessons today is gonna be all teacher talk. I'm the teacher, I'm talking to you, it's a hundred percent. But when I'm doing workshops and coaching I try to make it at least 50 percent, if not 75% of student talk. Because students, if they're not using the language they're not learning the language. So reflecting on your ratio is really important.

    And when you think about the four domains of language you can do the same across all four domains by self-assessing. We have listening and speaking, right? That's oracy, or spoken language. And then we have reading and writing, and that's literacy or written language. And students need both input and output. So they need to be getting input by listening and reading. And then they need to be demonstrating their comprehension and also using the language through the output channels of speaking and writing. And again, this is an activity that I do a lot in my coaching and I'll break it down for you in just a second, but you can really reflect on any given lesson and say, "Where am I?" Oh, is it, most of my students are listening 55% of the time and they only really spoke a couple minutes, say in a half an hour lesson.

    You can estimate these percentages and really decide where am I at? And then from there you can say "Which domain do I really need to practice?" And typically it's speaking. I do this pretty much every day in my career. Been doing this for a really long time both as a teacher and now as a coach. And speaking is overwhelmingly the domain that needs the most attention. So what I recommend is really getting down to the activities that you use and seeing where those gaps are so you can really improve your practice to boost that student discourse. So we can really list, like this example is here, are students listening and what are those activities, right? And then they're reading what are those activities? Oh, they're speaking, what are those activities and what's the quality of those activities as well as writing? So we really wanna be aware of what our strengths are across the domains so that when we're especially going online we have some go-to strategies that we can structure and maybe we can do them every day. We can do them in different ways to help students feel included and engaged and that the learning is centered around the students. That's really important.

    One way to do that is make sure that we're bringing in language functions. So you don't even have to be an ESL teacher to use language functions, they're great. They're usually right there in the common core or any kind of academic standards that you're using. Here's Describe for an example. So you wanna be sure students understand what the language function is. What does Describe mean? How can we pictorially represent it through graphic supports? What are some questions and answers that we may use? And again, not just, whoops, not just the teacher doing the questioning but students questioning and answering back and forth so that it is a discourse, because discourse is back and forth, it's not just one word in one sentence answering a question from a teacher, but having students talk to each other.

    And so we wanna really make this language explicit. It shouldn't be a secret, how do we describe, it shouldn't be a mystery. What is the language that we use to discuss say characteristics or traits? What are the sentence stems that can help us out there? Otherwise we're maybe expecting students to do things like Turn and Talk when they don't know what that is or actually know why they're doing it, or most importantly how to do it to boost their learning. Here's an example from one of our partner schools where they really bring these academic language functions to the four, and they help the students see you're speaking like scholars. This is how people in the workforce discuss problems when they're collaborating together. This is how college students speak.

    Myself personally, I talked about college before, I didn't really learn how to have adequate student discourse until I went to college. I didn't have things like Socratic seminar and academic conversation groups in my school. And that's the beauty of language-rich classrooms now for all levels is we're expecting students to do this. It's part of our new language standards, it's part of listening and speaking, reading and writing across the curriculum. It's exciting because all students should have access to this kind of discourse to to have voice by agreeing, disagreeing, by paraphrasing, by elaborating, by describing, on and on with all the many language functions that are rich within our instruction. Here's another list from my academic friend Jeff Zwiers who's done an extensive amount of research and practitioner work in this area. And he really promotes going beyond Turn and Talk to real deep conversations, and we rely on his work at Confianza quite a bit to really explain the importance of teaching kids the basic functions here like paraphrasing and even using hand signals like elaborating, supporting ideas with examples, synthesizing, making sure that it isn't again, a mystery, or something that we expect students to do without support.

    And when I'm coaching and doing this work with teachers we often model for students, do a fishbowl, have students reflect, what does an academic conversation sound like? What should it look like? How should we be responding to each other? Where should we be held accountable and how do we make sure that it actually is boosting student engagement and learning? Here's an example from some instruction that I was doing last semester when the Coronavirus pandemic hit, and I was working with a group of first and second graders and I blogged about this this spring as well where I really wanted them to see themselves in the learning as much as possible. And who doesn't love emojis, especially little girls, and in my group, especially the little girls I was working with.

    So this was a structure that we put into place and we had a different activity like this every day as a warmup. But I had here, not just pick a number, but here's the sentence frame down here. The emoji that matches how I'm feeling this morning is number blank because blank. This is something that you can use with all levels. I use this kind of thing with adults in PD because you may not use emojis, you may not use this exact prompt. But giving people a choice and then giving them the structure to express themself is gonna take you far. Other ways that you can boost discourse is making sure that we're highlighting vocabulary.

    So giving students the scaffolds like this organizer from a partner's school and helping them bring in their first language and making it student friendly with visuals and then sentence and then having students partner up and talk about these things together and put it in their own words. It shouldn't just be word level that we're hearing or phrase level that we're hearing or that students are writing. We need students to be speaking and writing in complete sentences. That should be an expectation. Otherwise they're never really going to always be expected to speak in complete sentences, especially the students that are building their language production. So by having scaffolded vocabulary activities that again are structured and routined, like for example you could do this every Tuesday with a new vocabulary word on your Zoom. And have students break into groups and fill it out and discuss, okay, what is our student-friendly definition in our group work? Let's go back and present it. Having students even using TPR, which is a gesture-type strategy for demonstrating vocabulary, things like that can get students moving and get students talking. And then what's really beautiful is if they can say it they can write it and vice versa. If they can write it, they can say it. So helping them see that bridge, as I mentioned before in the output channels of speaking and writing.

    Finally, as I mentioned before, group work. That's very, very important to consider. How are we breaking students into groups? Why are we putting certain students together? Who are those students? Are they getting equity and voice? Are they getting language models? Are they getting the supports that they need? And then again, the structures to make the groups accountable. This is an image from my book where I talk about if you're the teacher right here and you have all these students, you're essentially ping-ponging around the classroom.

    It's the same online. If you have a Zoom call with 25 students and you're seeing 25 faces, that's one way of presenting information. But when it's time for students to apply, instead of running around and answering questions to the larger group, put them in strategic groups and here you are in the middle. And then you can pop into the breakout rooms to check on the students and hold them accountable. So there's many ways to break students into groups. I'm just using Zoom as an example where we can pre-assign students, we can do random groupings, we can have stations, I've done that with my students where we have the conferring room, the revision room for writer's workshop, the room where students are generating ideas and need to talk to other students. The teacher conference room for example.

    You can also have students self-select rooms by renaming their name, which may or may not be a district policy that you can do in your district. But instead of saying, Sarah, for example, that would be my Zoom name, I could rename it as group one 'cause group one is the group that I wanna go in because of what the lesson is demanding. However, I did read this weekend that Zoom is considering a way for students to self-select in a much easier way. So we're looking forward to that news. I know I'll be using that when I'm work with adults as well. So we always wanna be learning, we always wanna be improving, we always wanna be thinking about discourse and going beyond that Turn and Talk.

    So these are some resources that I wanna show you very quickly, how to find on our website. And you can find these and more as well as my book, "Language Lens for Content Classrooms," which is great as a book study as well as just kind of an independent study, and it's integrated into all of our courses and coaching. So let me show you how to get to the blog. So if you go to the website at ELLstudents.com, you're going to see blog up here at the top. And right here you're gonna see the most current ones that we've published. So here's the strategies for remote content and teaching that I mentioned. However, if you're like, "Ooh, I wanna read that one on academic conversations," you can use the search button and you can just go ahead and search. And once it pulls up the options, you're gonna see all these examples with academic conversations in there. So you're welcome to look at any of those. The one that goes into that is right here, "Going Beyond 'Turn and Talk'." So this is that one.

    But again, feel free to explore, search, look for anything that might be useful for you. We have dozens and dozens of blogs that we're pumping out constantly. We also have the video page where I'm presenting right now as well as more information about The Language Lens and of course our offerings, as I mentioned before integrating all The Language Lens foundational pieces into all of our work. So I hope that was useful for you and I'm really looking forward to hearing how the school year starts. I know that it's a school year like none other and we're all learning and sharing, staying connected on social media, we're hopefully sharing our tips and our tricks and the tech tools that have come to light as we're all working together in this highly disruptive time of education. I think one silver lining of many is promoting more student discourse and accountability and collaboration in really innovative ways 'cause students really do need to be exposed to technology and they really do need to be fully centered in the teaching.

    So I wish all of you the best of luck in trying out the ways that you're planning to engage students in their discourse. And please stay connected to us on social media, here are my Twitter tags, and have a great school year everybody, we'll see you soon. Thanks so much.Description text goes here

Curriculum and InstructionSarah Ottow2b, t3, 4b