It’s easy to get kids to talk to each other, but how do we get them to listen to each other?
Ross Thorburn: Matt Cuortois, welcome back.
Matt Cuortois: It's always a pleasure, Ross.
Ross: Great. Today we're talking about student interactions, getting students to talk to each other, basically. Why is this important?
Matt: Back when you and I started teaching, the way that my boss or trainer addressed this issue was to talk about teacher talk time. They set up this target where I, as the teacher, would only be able to talk 20 percent of the time. 80 percent of the time would then be left for students to talk to each other.
That whole thing isn't a great paradigm because it is flawed in its logic. I've seen classes where when the teachers didn't talk, that didn't mean students were talking. It was just awkward silence a lot of the time.
Ross: Right. The flip side of the teacher talk is the student talking time. Of course, it's the same thing. Just because the students are talking doesn't mean they're actually learning.
You're going to think about the quality of student interactions. We're talking about students actually saying meaningful things to each other and, really crucially, the other student having reason to listen to what the other person's saying.
Matt: I do think still though that goal of having students talking 80 percent of the time is a good goal.
Ross: Yeah, absolutely. Once you get beyond being a complete beginner, where you can't really say anything, then that makes sense.
Let's talk about some of these really simple ways of getting students talking to each other. One of the simplest things is an information gap. This is something you hear a lot about with adults.
With kids, one of my favorite ways to do this is you get half the students facing the front of the room, half of them facing the back of the room, put some information on a screen at the front. The students who can see the whiteboard have to describe that information to the other students.
Again, the most simple way I can think of doing this is, you have a coloring in sheet with some really, really simple vocabulary, like animals. The teacher version on the board, everything's already colored in. Hopefully the colors are weird.
Let's say we've got a pink dog, and a green cat, and an orange zebra. The student facing the board has to describe that to the other student. That other student has this blank coloring sheet. They just need to listen to that other student and color it in.
I think this works for a few ways. Obviously, you have this gap there, but one of the other key things is that the student doing the coloring in has a reason to listen to the first student. Also, really, really importantly, the first student can see if the second student has understood them or not.
If you've colored one of those animals the wrong color, I can see and then I can say, "No, no, no. [laughs] Not this color. Color it in something different". That's when a lot of learning tends to happen is when those bits of communication break down because students have to focus on grammar, or form, or pronunciation to try and make that meaning clear, to resolve the misunderstanding.
Matt: There's also a really important point you made there about the students need a reason to listen. Whenever we talk about a communicative lesson, we think of students talking, talking, talking. Communication is not just talking. That's half of it. The other half needs to be filled with somebody who's listening.
Ross: This also makes me think of something else. In any activity like that...Let's say this is a coloring activity, very common with kids. You're also rarely likely to have enough pens or pencils or crayons for every kid in the class, to be able to have all the colors that they need.
It's also a great opportunity for kids to use English to ask each other for these pens and pencils. You could say to the kids, "What do you say if you need to borrow this pain from someone? Blue, please. Yellow, please." That's another great way of building communication into classes is by not having enough resources for every individual student.
Matt: Now you're getting into students really being able to learn a lot of important values for their life. They need to learn, at this age, how to share. They need to learn how to listen to each other. Without that communication in class, without these kinds of activities where students need each other, they aren't going to learn that in your lessons.
Ross: Now we can get into things about teaching students the language, of, for example, when you don't understand what someone else had said in one of these activities. You can say, "I'm sorry. Can you say it again, please? I don't understand." Those are also things that you really need in real life a lot of the time.
Matt: That language that they're learning, by going through this process, is a lot more useful than, in your example, a pink elephant or a pink...What was it? A pink dog. They're learning those words. They're also learning these really useful phrases that they'll need throughout their English classes, throughout other classes, and then in their real life. You need to learn how to repair a conversation.
Ross: I know with a lot of language like this, teachers find it very difficult to present. There's no flash card for, "I'm sorry," or "I don't understand," or "Say that again, please." These things can be quite difficult for teachers to teach.
If you do these activities regularly with your students, you can find, by monitoring, times when communication hasn't worked. Afterwards, you can say to the class, "What happened when you didn't understand?" You could do this in the student's first language, for example. "What did you say?"
You might say, "I heard Johnny say to Mary, ' [non‑English speech] ,'" or whatever in their first language. You say, "How could we say that in English?" Then, get those things on the board. "All right. Fantastic. Now, swap roles. Do the activity again. This time when you don't understand, use these phrases on the board."
Matt: What's great about that is that you're teaching them words that they needed. They needed to know how to say that in English, but they didn't know how. You're not just teaching them words that the coursebook writer and Cambridge decided they needed.
Ross: A very typical thing in a coursebook is you might have a dialogue that's on the first couple of pages of one unit. The idea is that by the end of the lesson, the students will be able to use that dialogue. What you just said there, you're really getting away from that.
Matt: I've seen so many lessons where, basically, there's person A and person B. They're not necessarily directly reading off of the script from the book, but they have it memorized. That's not really a roleplay. It's not even really communication. They're not actually saying anything that the other person needs.
Ross: A quick tip for role‑plays is you can give students a little role card to say, "you're angry" or "you're happy" or "you just won the lottery." Then maybe afterwards, we say, "Can you guess how was the other person feeling?"
Matt: Yeah. You're listening to a lot of the...not just the words also. You're listening to how the person is saying the words.
Ross: I can't remember where I heard this. I remember an example of this for adults was some sort of boring shopping role‑play. They said, The shopper, you are the ex‑wife of the shop owner, and you didn't know this was his shop. Now, go and do the role‑play." That just makes it so much more interesting.
Matt: After they do that role‑play, it gives people a lot to think about. How did that affect the way the person spoke?
Ross: After doing any one of these things, it's always a jumping off point for summarizing the task. Let's say, to go back to the coloring in one earlier, you could just say to the students, "What color was the dog? What color was the elephant?" Then, you're getting a little bit of production from the students and checking.
You can say, "I heard that you say...What color did you say this was? You said it was light blue? OK. What's the difference between light blue and blue?" Start to use that to teach a bit more language. The thing you said there with after our role‑play, "How do you think the other person was feeling? What things did they say that was different from the original role‑play?"
Matt: Not only can you do them, you need to do these things after a task. Ultimately, it's about communication, and it's about practicing language. What language did they use? How could they use that language better? Was there any language that they should have used that they didn't use?
Ross: A couple of tips for that. Maybe one is, let's say that we've just told the students a bunch of ways to give suggestions. After getting students to give each other suggestions, you could say, "Well, which of these phrases did you use? Which of them did you not use? Tell us why."
Another tip for getting students would be to focus on some of these things or have more information to talk about afterwards. You can have a third role in any of these activities we've talked about, which is an observer. Write down what you hear the people saying.
You could either say, "Write down any mistakes you hear afterwards. Write down any examples of the first language that you hear. How could we say those things in English?"
All these are ways of doing what you said earlier, Matt, which is finding gaps in the students own knowledge and filling those in a very personalized way.
Matt: The way a lot of teachers naturally teach is that they want their students to be producing error‑free sentences. If you're teaching this way, where you're throwing students in and having them do this, they're going to make a lot of mistakes.
You really need to put a lot of effort into creating an environment where students feel comfortable to make mistakes. Don't have them memorizing the entire script before they say it. You push them along that process of getting them to that point of being comfortable with actually communicating in a second language.
Ross: If you do that, and the students make those mistakes, that's good. That's when you can actually teach them these bits of language that are going to help them better next time.
Matt: You've identified whenever they make a mistake, language that they need. You've identified a teachable moment.
Ross: [laughs] Absolutely. Let's talk about actually doing some of these things in reality. For an information gap activity, like the one we mentioned earlier, where one student talks, and the other student listens and does something. A good way of introducing that is just for the teacher, the first time, to be the person giving the information.
Matt: If you're teaching in an environment where you have the same students every week, that doesn't need to happen in one lesson. In the first lesson, you, as the teacher can be describing these animals, and the students are coloring it in. They're receiving. They're working on their listening.
A week later, in their next lesson, maybe you can have a couple students try it out. The next week you can have the other students trying it out.
Ross: I feel another loophole with some of these activities is that students can often use gestures to get a random or pointing. Just to go back to my example again earlier, you could just point to something and say, "Blue."
Really important with these, just to say to, for example, the student whose describing you have to sit on your hands while you're describing. A tiny little difference, but all of a sudden, it means that you can't use gestures, or you have to try to do all of this in English.
Again, how do you know students will do it? If you've got a big class, you might want to pick one or two students who were a little bit more outspoken. You ask them to be police and walk around, and then remind everyone to speak English, and catch them up if they're ever speaking any L1.
Matt: I've seen it a million times. Whenever teachers introduce that activity and they say, "No looking at the picture." Inevitably, the students find ways, especially if you're teaching young learners, they're going to find a way to cheat.
Ross: Let's talk about some other ways that you can hide that information. One way is simply yet people have got their backs to the board. The most foolproof way is you actually put the information outside the classroom. One student has to run outside the door, look at the thing, and then come back in and describe it.
Matt: Depending on what kind of information it is, you can just put it really far away. One student is mobile and can walk straight up to it and come back and give them that information.
Ross: Another one I've seen is if you have the students turn round in their chairs, but they don't turn the chair around. If you can imagine that the back of your chair is to your chest, you could stick the hidden information on that back of the chair. The person would really have to lean forward so far [laughs] they would topple over to be able to see the information.
Matt: I saw a cool one. This took a little bit of preparation from the teacher.
She made these headbands out of paper. They go around and then I got a piece of paper sticking up in front and then she could just tack on different images to that piece of paper sticking up off of their head. Everyone else in the classroom could see what was on their head band, but that student couldn't see what was on his own head band.
Ross: I've done this before, as well, where maybe you get a word or something, and you stick it on the students' backs. Then, I have to ask you to give me clues about what one word is, and I have to try and get it.
Matt: You can also set up the classroom. You can have your students sitting back‑to‑back. One side can see it. You can keep an eye on the other students on the far side. Make sure they're not turning around and looking back at the information that you're showing to half of the class.
Ross: I feel the way it is easiest for students to cheat is if we are just holding two bits of paper. I feel they are right that the temptation is very, very high just to hold a bit of paper at an angle where the other person can see it. There's varying degrees there of how well you want to hide your information depending on the self‑control of the students.