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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?
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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.
