More Than Scaffolds...Providing the Right Space For Oracy Instruction
by Sarah Said
Language output is never easy for new language learners. When combined with new norms of students not interacting with peers outside of school as much as they did in the past, it can be a struggle for teachers to support students in building oral language for social and academic needs. In the world we are living in, oracy support has to move beyond providing scaffolds. With changes in accessibility to technology, students aren’t as willing to speak to people in real life as they have before. This means as teachers we need to work with our students to create a risk-free environment that supports oracy. By oracy, we mean students sharing their thinking through oral language--through both listening and speaking.
Helping students find the words to speak is one thing, but motivating students to interact with other students is a whole new challenge that we face--particularly in the upper grades. Students need to feel safe with teachers and with each other before they can dive in to build their speaking proficiency. Handing a student a card with sentence stems on it just doesn’t do it anymore in giving them the support they need. We need to cultivate classroom spaces that support interaction. And, as teachers, schools and communities it is important to design learning opportunities that support oracy.
Cultivating a Classroom Environment That Supports Oracy
Our classroom environments should create safe spaces that invite students to feel at ease when it comes to having conversations. How we design our space is key. I teach 10th, 11th and 12th grade English for English Leaders, and I have been very intentional about how I design my space. My classroom has round tables—which I got lucky to acquire. One of my classroom non-negotiables is that students cannot sit alone. When they sit alone, they create a self-isolation that makes talking feel more like a risk. Besides having tables in the room, I fitted them with “café-like” tablecloths and each table has a bin of resources for the students. Students are instructed on what the resources are for--pens, pencils, expo markers, speaking stem cards, role descriptions for collaborative grouping and feelings wheels.
Additionally, actively using the space for language is very important. The walls are spaces where students can visually see our learning and language targets, our vocabulary, and anchor charts. The anchor charts are a big deal because when students are working in groups they can consult the anchor charts without teacher support to help them resolve issues. This ideally supports authentic real-world conversation which is what we want students to have. You can read more about classroom real-estate here.
The first few days were the most important for me this school year. It took me two weeks before I even started to work with the content curriculum. Students spent time getting to know each other through structured activities like bridge building and marshmallow towers. These activities created a risk free way of students getting to know and learning about each other while having authentic conversations. Most importantly we created social contracts, got to learn about each other's work styles, and learned about what it means to work as a team. You can read more about social contracts here. When students establish these norms together, they create community and it becomes a risk free space where academic conversations can happen because we were able to break through the social language needs. And when new students come in, they become part of the space and are able to start acquiring oral language with the others as well.
Designing Learning Opportunities For Oracy
As classroom space and community design is important to give students a bridge for gaining oracy in English, creating learning opportunities that allow students to feel the ability to authentically use academic language is critical. Every unit I design and plan has to have multiple spaces for oracy in order for students to be able to really dig into the ability to have conversation with each other.
Much of this was emphasized in Going Beyond the Turn and Talks: Academic Conversations For Language Learners, which you can read here. Sarah Ottow, founder of Confianza, emphasized the key uses of language and planning for the purpose of language. Yes, we can plan the structures of our classroom and how we want discussions to “look” and what types of media our students can produce, but we also need to plan with usage of language in mind. Do we want our students to explain, argue, summarize, paraphrase? Yes we do, this comes with some direct instruction of word usage, modeling, and then releasing responsibility onto students in order to allow them to use their language and develop their proficiency.
When I plan a unit, I think about the purpose of the literature and writing they are learning. From there, I try to ensure that there are multiple language dives in each unit. This is a way of slowing down curriculum so that students can deconstruct complex text. Then, I ensure there are multiple structured opportunities for students to have small and large group discussions. Whatever scaffolds are there to support students are ones that students are either familiar with or made familiar with through direct instruction first.
Mindful Scaffolding of Oral Language
Scaffolding language is a way for us to support students as they move back into a more student-centered classroom. But, scaffolding is not effective unless we have created the environment and instructional design that helps with the learning process. In considering mindfulness and creating a stress-free approach for student oral language usage in the classroom, start off with more complicated ways of speaking in smaller groups without scaffolds where students follow models you provide them for speaking. Then add the sentence stems and supports after students have tried the more complicated support in a small group and moving to a larger group. Students may actually feel better about their oral language using stems for discussions after using a less scaffolded approach.
You can also allow students to use an audio recorder to record a presentation they are making or a discussion they are having to practice. Then students can build their confidence as they are getting ready to speak in front of a large group. This creates an approach that engages students in using oral language for presentation purposes but is less intimidating than just giving the presentation or having the discussion in a larger group session.
Project Based Learning and Oracy
As the instructional design and the scaffolds are supporting language there can be opportunities to support students with project based learning. In my classroom, students have dove into Passion Projects where in groups they took causes they cared about and they designed innovations to help the cause. The students naturally used academic and social language in their small groups to communicate, then they presented to the larger class and other teachers. They not only were able to present, but we created an environment where students were also receiving feedback out in the open and responded to that feedback. Students were open to doing this because they had built the community for it.
Oracy is not something that can just be put off the side. It is the beginning of language output for many students and leads to stronger literacy. If we build the right community in our classroom, students will be more willing to engage in conversation. Really, it starts with us. It’s more than providing a scaffold or two, it’s providing a safe space that is rooted in a risk-free philosophy for language learning that is an equitable environment for amplifying the voices of all students.
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