Three Strategies for Enriching the Quantity and Quality of Classroom Talk
November 2014
In a special issue of ASCD Express, Talking and
Listening in Class, REEd executive director Susan O’Hara, with
co-writers Jeff Zwiers and Robert Pritchard, provide strategies
for improving talk in the classroom. In “Three Strategies for
Enriching the Quantity and Quality of Classroom Talk,” they
write:
“Decades of focusing on raising reading and math scores have deconditioned many teachers’ abilities to improve students’ oral language skills across disciplines and grade levels. Especially in schools with low standardized test scores, lesson design has focused on quiet activities that prepare students for multiple-choice tests. Many students have come to think that learning means memorizing facts, shortcuts, word meanings, and grammar rules to be counted on tests.
“Yet many valuable things that students need to learn for college and life cannot be easily counted. We argue that this is especially true for speaking skills. In fact, the ability to communicate orally is often cited as the number-one skill desired by employers.”
