Regular guest Matt Courtois and I discuss what makes quality teacher talk. How should young learner teachers give instructions? How much should teachers grade their language? And when should teachers say nothing at all?
Quality Teacher Talk with Young Learners (with Matt Courtois)
Ross Thorburn: Matt Cuortois, welcome back to the podcast.
Matt Cuortois: Always a pleasure, Ross.
Ross: Always a pleasure for me, too. Today we're talking about teacher talk. I feel that usually when you hear about teacher talk, people talk about teacher talk time, but today we're not going to talk about that at all. We're going to talk much more about the quality rather than the quantity of teacher talk.
There's obviously so many different aspects and everything to teacher talk, but one of the most obvious ones is giving instructions.
Instructions I feel are important for more than one reason in class, because obviously, if you don't get clear instructions, then everything else probably that you do in class is not going to work very well because the students don't know what to do.
Also instructions, I feel, especially when you're teaching kids, it's maybe the time when there's the most communication in English because students are listening to you not just to repeat what you say afterwards, but they're actually listening so they know what to do afterwards.
Matt: It's also when teaching kids it's one of the largest chunks of time that a teacher should be talking, right?
Ross: Hopefully, not too long.
Matt: That's probably one of the most common pieces of feedback I give to teachers is don't explain, show them what you expect them to do. It's so much simpler the language that you would be using by just showing them rather than explaining the whole process. Actually, any time you get a new board game like Monopoly or Risk or whatever.
It always starts off the same way with you and your friend. Where you get out this instruction book and you look at these 40 or 50 steps, and the person is reading out every step of how to play the game and the same thing inevitably happens at the end of it where the person reading the instructions is like, so you guys get that?
Ross: Not really. Let's just do one round as a practice.
Matt: Yes, everyone always says it every time. Let's play a practice round and we'll figure it out and then we'll play for real. The board game is the exact same as a classroom activity, where the students are sitting there listening to this long process of do step one, step two, step three.
It is all jumbled up in there. I think a much more effective way is just try it out for a practice round and then stop a minute, make sure they understand it and then go through the activity.
Ross: It's like a picture is worth a thousand words and I feel like a demonstration is worth a thousand instruction. A couple of things that work well for that one is that when you model something, typically there's more than one role that the teacher needs to model.
One nice thing I saw a teacher do once is when demonstrating a dialogue is holding up one finger on each hand with those fingers facing each other and just using our two fingers as a way of showing like this is these two people talking. Then, you could also take on different voices for the two roles.
That's another thing or you could physically move. I've seen teachers before, draw on the board two faces and then stand next to one face and put on one voice when you're demonstrating one role and then you switch to the other side of the board and stand next to the other face. That helps to make it salient to the students.
Matt: A lot of course book materials will also come with some extras that are useful for modeling. I know one school I worked at every set of course books comes with a tiger puppet. What a great way of instead of using your fingers and wiggling your fingers and you can be person A and then you can be talking to the tiger puppet on your hand as a person B.
At another school, every teacher have finger puppets, they were able to have multiple people and on their fingers to show off the different roles within the conversation.
Ross: I love those ideas. Another thing teachers do before they get on to getting the students to do the activity is asking some checking questions. But I feel there are some checking questions that are much more valuable than others, right?
Matt: Yeah, the kinds of instruction checking questions you want short responses. Do you do A or do you do B? Are you the customer or are you the seller? It's clarifying key points of the task and the level of words that you're using, like six‑year‑old students, haven't studied words like unscramble, gap‑fill.
To be honest, learning the word unscramble or gap‑fill isn't ever going to be useful for them outside of an English lesson. You don't want to spend that precious time teaching them the word like unscramble whenever there are those content words that you do want to focus on.
Ross: I feel another thing that teachers can do, which is part of what we talked about with modeling there is using body language to help make classroom instruction really just anything in the classroom a lot easier. There's some almost standard body language gestures that teachers should have and develop and maybe be conscious of using again and again with their students.
I mean, just simple things like having your palms facing upwards and moving your hands up to indicate stand up, sit down, putting your hand behind your ear to indicate time to listen, or making little...
Matt: Binoculars?
Ross: Yeah. A little binoculars and then putting them up to your eyes for look or maybe waving one of your hands, holding a pretend pencil for draw, maybe pointing up and tapping on the side of your head for think, you almost need to teach these gestures to your students.
If you also say the word at the same time as you're doing the action, then gradually students will get to know the meaning of those keywords as well.
Matt: The one that came to my mind immediately is pair up or talk to your partner, which I've always, as a teacher, just taken my two hands, extended my arms, and pushed my hands together. Students know immediately if you do it again and again and again in class over the course of weeks and months, they know exactly what that means. You don't have to go through the process of saying, talk to the person next to you, whenever you can just simply gesture.
Ross: Use my gesture and students will know what to do. I feel this is another thing especially with instructions, is that usually if you repeat them enough times and you do similar activities in your classes, which is a good thing because students will get better at the activities the more often that you do them, that sometimes you just don't really need to give any instructions at all.
Sometimes just like one little gesture is enough and students know, oh, we're going to do this activity that we do at the beginning of every class. I guess up until now, we've been talking about students practicing language, but I feel like another big part of teacher talk is eliciting, so finding out what students already know.
This is something that's almost like the opposite of teacher talk. The key here is often teacher's silence. A lot of teachers forget how long it takes to think of something.
Matt: I think we're so used to TV or podcasts. We're talking to each other quite a bit, but you do edit this conversation to get rid of some awkward silences and everything, it's not real. We need more time to think when we're talking and in an English classroom, they need even more time than us.
It might feel awkward and boring to us, those students' minds might be racing. They're just trying to think of, how does this go or what is that word? They're linking it back to the class. It's not even awkward for those students.
Ross: I also feel that when we talk about silence, we're talking about outward silence, what you can hear outside in the classroom. But, of course, every student in their own head can hear themselves. It's a really good idea to ask students to put up their hands whenever you've asked a question.
A couple of steps for this, one is ask the question first. Get the students to put up their hands, and then once you see a lot of hands going up, then nominate someone to answer the question because if you do that, hopefully, a lot of students have already answered the question in their own heads, whereas if the students to shout something out.
Then you've short‑circuited the thinking process for the other students in the room. I feel another thing there that teachers can do is eventually get students to ask each other questions.
I think very often in classes, the teacher will ask a question, picks a student, the student answers the question. A simple way you can change that is after you've asked a question, a student answered, you just say ask the next question. The student repeats the same question, if it's very low‑level student, just say what I said.
Student says the question again, I pick someone to answer and they pick someone else to answer the question. You end up with a chain going round the classroom of students asking another question, picking the next person to answer it.
It obviously gives the students a lot more language practice, gives them a bit more control over the class because they're choosing who answers the next question. Also, it gives some practice asking questions, which is something that obviously is really important, learning a language and being able to ask questions.
Another important thing with eliciting and asking questions to the whole group is where you stand. In real life or outside the classroom, I should say, when we're talking to someone and we can't hear them, we're going to stand close to them. In the classroom, if you stand close to the student that you're talking to, they're not going to speak very loudly.
Lots of other students in the class won't be able to hear. Tip for teachers is when you're eliciting or asking a student a question, especially in a big class, move as far away from that student as you can in the room, and that student will automatically raise the volume level, usually to the point where everyone can hear.
This is so important because you often hear teachers complain, "Oh, my other students don't listen in the class, they'll fidget or they'll talk to their partner." But a prerequisite for listening is actually the volume being loud enough that you can hear it.
Matt: What a great example of something a teacher can do to eliminate a lot of unnecessary words. A lot of times teachers in that situation will say speak louder so everyone can hear you.
Ross: Or the teacher will echo and repeat what the students say for the rest of the class.
Matt: Whereas just stepping back further away, putting your hand up next to your ear and saying, "Can you say that again?" Its clearer what you're trying to get to happen and you're using fewer and simpler words in order to get that to happen.
Ross: One more thing that I think we haven't talked about because a lot of this has been about the words that we use. I also want to talk about how we use them. One thing I saw recently was a teacher taking in a microphone and a speaker to class. I thought, if you're having trouble being heard by your students, don't speak louder, speak more quiet.
Matt: I definitely had that experience as a student when I was very young. I can remember a lot of my classmates were very noisy. A lot of times what the teacher would do is she would talk very softly and then we all had to then, in turn, quiet down to hear her, is quite effective. Everyone quieted down and then they're listening more closely.
Ross: It's got to be better for your own voice as well. I feel that's one thing, speaking quietly. But I also have noticed some teachers speaking in a way that's unnatural. "You, can you see my cat? Can you see?" You could speak in a way that's slow and understandable, but while still sounding natural.
Matt: Not to analyze the language too much, but if you can find the keywords in your sentences that carry the most meaning and you really punch those words in terms of stressing them more, making them a little bit louder, a little bit longer, maybe pausing a little bit afterwards.
Ross: Maybe adding a gesture to go along with that word as well.
Matt: That's the best thing you can do and it sounds natural when you're doing it. We've been talking about the teacher as somebody who's modeling the language. The fact is, you're modeling the language the whole time. It's not like, "Here I'm giving instructions and here I'm modeling what I expect you to do."
You're always the modeler of English as the teacher. When you're giving instructions, it should sound natural also.