Effective Teacher Talk Strategies in the Classroom
Teacher Talk
Teachers adopt a style of speech that incorporates mime, body language, and references to real objects, pictures, maps, and diagrams. This helps students understand, despite their limited knowledge of the language of instruction. Teachers also structure their speech with regular pauses to give listeners more chances to comprehend and include regular comprehension checks to ensure that everyone is following along. Teachers constantly select words familiar to their listeners. They use many cognates—English words that, although unfamiliar, are close enough to words in the listeners’ native language to be comprehensible.
Features of Teacher Talk
- Non-linguistic Support for Comprehension
- Visibility: Teachers ensure they (particularly their mouths and eyes) are visible to students.
- Facial Expression
- Body Language (Gestures): When teaching beginners, teachers demonstrate their meaning with actions or gestures while expressing it verbally.
- Reference to Real Objects and People: “This is a red school bag. It’s Mario’s schoolbag, isn’t it, Mario?”
- Pictures, Diagrams, Maps, etc.: “As you can see, there are high mountains in Wales and Scotland” (pointing at a map of the UK).
- Regular Checks
- Primarily through observing listeners’ facial expressions rather than asking if they understand or requesting demonstrations of comprehension.
- Eye Contact: A good teacher frequently makes eye contact with each student.
- Regular Pauses
- Teachers recognize that students’ comprehension is slower than their speech, so they pause regularly to allow students to catch up.
- Some teachers, after a long stream of speech, will ask students to “tell your partners what I have just said.” This allows students to share their understanding and helps them catch up.
- Familiar Words
- Words that students have learned in previous lessons.
- High-frequency words from the top 2,000 list. [You can see this list in the back of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.]
- Cognates: Words that students will recognize and understand from their L1 knowledge. In speech, cognates are English words that sound like L1 words. In writing, cognates may be comprehensible from the spelling.
- Key Vocabulary related to a topic is taught or recycled before starting.
- Familiar Topics
- Topics related to the students’ everyday lives, allowing them to use their “world knowledge” to aid comprehension.
- Topics studied in previous lessons.
- Immediate Repetition and/or Paraphrase
- Teachers may repeat using the same words or repeat the same ideas in different words, giving listeners more time and opportunities to comprehend.
- Teachers build regular summaries into their speech.
- Slower, Clearer Talk
- Teacher talk is slightly slower than normal conversational speech.
- English carries most meaning through consonants rather than vowels, so teachers carefully articulate consonants, particularly those at the ends of words.