Providing children with opportunities to talk about their learning enables teachers to hear what children are thinking. Talking with one another allows children to question, elaborate, and reflect on a range of ideas. Classroom talk can be motivating and involving, and helps children to think and learn. And yet it is difficult to organise such talk in a classroom. Children unaware of the importance of talk for learning may think of talk as ‘just chat’ – and learning falls away as they slip into social talk. This book provides teachers with strategies and resources to enable whole classes to work together through the medium of talk. Creating a Speaking and Listening Classroom provides timely professional development for teachers. Based on a theoretical approach underpinned by classroom research, this book offers classroom-tested strategies for engaging children in their own learning. Such strategies involve the direct teaching of speaking and listening. Activities in the book can ensure that children know how and why to support one another’s learning in whole-class and group work. The approach enables teachers to ensure that personalised learning programs are based on what children already think and know. The suggested strategies for teaching speaking and listening can enable children to use one another’s minds as a rich resource. This stimulating book will be of interest to professionals in primary education, literacy co-ordinators, and trainee primary teachers.

Based on a theoretical approach underpinned by classroom research, Creating a Speaking and Listening Classroom offers classroom-tested strategies for engaging children in their own learning.

Speaking Across the Curriculum gives teachers ready-made speaking and listening activities that can be infused into any curriculum. Over 50 activities help teachers encourage debate and discussion and teach students speaking and listening skills. Students will learn how to outline a speech, build active listening skills, develop a media presentation, persuade an audience and speak spontaneously. Activities also help students analyze and evaluate arguments and sources, including web sites.

Hilarious notes between a son and his mom show how kid logic can be very persuasive. Alex just has to convince his mom to let him have an iguana, so he puts his arguments in writing. He promises that she won't have to feed it or clean its cage or even see it if she doesn't want to. Of course Mom imagines life with a six-foot-long iguana eating them out of house and home. Alex's reassures her: It takes fifteen years for an iguana to get that big. I'll be married by then and probably living in my own house His mom's reply: How are you going to get a girl to marry you when you own a giant reptile? Kis will be in hysterics as the negotiations go back and forth through notes, and the lively, imaginative illustrations showing their polar opposite dreams of life with an iguana take the humor to even higher heights.

A seasoned educator presents eight high-impact instructional practices to close achievement gaps and get all students--whether struggling or excelling--in the academic fast lane.

This is the newly updated SECOND EDITION! This version has been fully re-checked for accuracy and re-formatted to make it even more user-friendly, following feedback after a full year of classroom use by thousands of teachers across the world. Spanish Sentence Builders is a workbook aimed at beginner to pre-intermediate students co-authored by two modern languages educators with over 40 years of extensive classroom experience between the two, both in the UK and internationally. This 'no-frills' book contains 19 units of work on very popular themes, jam-packed with graded vocabulary-building, reading, translation, retrieval practice and writing activities. Key vocabulary, lexical patterns and structures are recycled and interleaved throughout. Each unit includes: 1) A sentence builder modelling the target constructions; 2) A set of vocabulary building activities; 3) A set of narrow reading texts exploited through a range of tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text; 4) A set of retrieval-practice translation tasks; 5) A set of writing tasks targeting essential micro-skills such as spelling, lexical retrieval, syntax, editing and communication of meaning. Based on the Extensive Processing Instruction (E.P.I.) principle that learners learn best from comprehensible and highly patterned input flooded with the target linguistic features, the authors have carefully designed each and every text and activity to enable the student to process and produce each item many times over. This occurs throughout each unit of work as well as in smaller grammar, vocabulary and question-skills micro-units located at regular intervals in the book, which aim at reinforcing the understanding and retention of the target grammar, vocabulary and question patterns.

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge draws on the most prominent writing of Neil Mercer, covering his ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work on the role of talk in education, and on the relationship between spoken language and cognition. The text explores key themes, relating theoretical ideas to research evidence and to practical educational situations that improve children’s lives. Offering students and researchers a clear, accessible and up-to-date account of a sociocultural perspective on the relationship between spoken language and cognition, it explains one of the key themes in Neil Mercer’s work – that humans have uniquely evolved the capacity to think together, or ‘interthink’. Offering a crucial insight into the work of Neil Mercer, this selection showcases why his approach has become the dominant paradigm in educational research, and why it is increasingly influential in the psychology of teaching and learning. This unique collection of published articles and chapters, which represent the key themes and range of his research over the last 40 years, will be of interest to all followers of his work and any reader interested in the role of language in education.

Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Leaners How to Listen.To cite use Conti and Smith (2019).This book is for language teachers who want to help their students become more effective listeners. It focuses on the processes involved in aural comprehension, blending the latest research evidence with over 200 engaging listening activities, as well as lots of useful practical classroom ideas and lesson sequences.Chapters include the principles of "listening as modelling", developing phonological and lexical retrieval skills, grammatical parsing, interpersonal and task-based listening. There are also chapters on how to make the most of songs, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, assessment and preparing for examinations. The final chapter offers a framework for language teachers or departments who wish to develop a strategy for improved listening. The book aims to place listening at the forefront of lesson planning.Gianfranco and Steve have around 60 years of classroom experience between them and a track record of offering instantly usable, low-preparation activities for the classroom, supported by second language acquisition research. Their handbook The Language Teacher Toolkit is already widely used around the world. Too often, classroom listening is neglected by teachers and a source of fear for learners; how can we make it a successful and enjoyable experience for all? This book is truly unique in its genre, in proposing a different and more impactful answer to this question. We sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Math coach, Kassia Omohundro Wedekind and literacy coach, Christy Hermann Thompson, have spent years comparing notes on how to build effective classroom communities across the content areas. How, they wondered, can we lay the groundwork for classroom conversations that are less teacher-directed and more conducive to student-to-student dialogue? Their answers start with Hands-Down Conversations, an innovative discourse structure in which students' ideas and voices take the lead while teachers focus on listening and facilitating. In addition to classrom stories and examples, Christy and Kassia provide 28 micro-lessons designed to help K-5 students develop and excercise their speaking and listening muscles. Inside Hands Down, Speak Out you'll learn how to: Build talk communities that are accessible to everyone, especially those whose voices are often traditionally left out of classroom discourse. Analyze classroom conversations in order to plan next steps for developing the classroom talk community Plan and facilitate three types of conversations across literacy and math Christy and Kassia believe that the development of dialogue skills is worth the investment of time not only becuase it has the power to deepen our understanding of literacy and mathematics, but also to deepen our understanding of ourselves, our communities, and the world.

Your essential guide for teaching core competencies that every child needs for developing into a highly engaged, self-motivated learner. The Language of Learning offers a practical approach to teaching essential communication skills: Listening and understanding; Thinking before speaking; Speaking clearly and concisely; Asking thoughtful questions; Giving high-quality answers; Backing up opinions with reasons and evidence; Agreeing thoughtfully; Disagreeing respectfully.