How often do all students participate actively and have opportunities for discussion in your classes? Typically, it is challenging to get all students speaking in a class. It is also challenging to design lessons that incorporate a multitude of opportunities for students to speak/ produce language and engage in extended discourse during short class periods. However, in order for students to develop language, they need to speak and produce language as often as possible. This language production can occur in various formats.  Students may use oral (spoken) language, sign language, or augmented communication devices as their form of language production. 

Developing oral language and literacy through content instruction is a powerful support and language development strategy for diverse learners. By producing language in context about the content, students can develop their knowledge and understanding. Developing oral language in this way is also connected to developing text-based skills like reading comprehension. 

To develop oral language, we should designate specific points throughout the lesson when we intentionally build in opportunities for sustained oral language production and support, particularly for multilingual learners who are developing English. This is most effective for multilingual learners when oral language development is supported through sheltered instruction (Richards-Tutor et al., 2016) , including: creating clear language goals to support content; making content comprehensible; providing explicit strategy instruction; and building in and supporting opportunities for interaction (Echavarria & Short, 2012). 

Intentional Opportunities For Oral Language Production

The key to developing oral language is to create regular, sustained, intentional, goal-driven opportunities for students to produce language and use language to interact and build knowledge about what they are learning. Peer and cooperative learning, instructional conversations, and translanguaging are three examples of ways to do this.

• Peer & Cooperative Learning Activities: Cooperative learning activities are an excellent way to build in structured and goal-directed opportunities for students to develop oral language. These activities can be embedded throughout direct instruction for students to do quick comprehension checks and to reflect on concepts with peers. Embedded cooperative brainstorming, comprehension checks, and discussion strategies, like Think-Pair-Share are a great way to intentionally build in opportunities for oral language production. Collaborative reading strategies, such as Collaborative Strategic Reading, Reciprocal Teaching, and PALS, also include intentional and structured opportunities for students to produce language to support comprehension (See the resources for more detailed information on these practices). Additionally, building in well-scaffolded opportunities for cooperative learning activities is another great way to support oral language production and development.
• Instructional Conversations: Goal-directed instructional conversations are another way to develop essential oral language skills and support reading comprehension. Instructional conversations are goal-directed discussions, focused on developing ideas and content understanding between a small group of students and the teacher (CREDE). The teacher can use questioning and prompting to help students develop their language and understanding as well as to make connections to students’ backgrounds, experiences, and judgments of a topic. We can integrate instructional conversations into lessons, to provide opportunities for students to produce language and have extended discourse during class. This also allows students to develop their learning and understanding through dialogue, which may be more familiar and comfortable for some multilingual learners.

• Translanguaging Practices: Supporting language production provides a multitude of opportunities to encourage multilingual learners to engage in translanguaging to draw on their full linguistic repertoire. Translanguaging is both a fluid use of language and a pedagogical practice. The fluid use of students’ full linguistic repertoire occurs when they draw on all of their linguistic resources to make meaning and to communicate without thinking about the languages as separate systems.  As a pedagogy, teachers provide opportunities for students to do this by, for example, reading in one language and discussing in a more comfortable language, or by using more than one language or variety of language to express themselves. To support translanguaging in the classroom, teachers do not need to speak all of their students’ languages. They should, however, ask their students questions and get to know them as more than “English learners”, honoring and valuing the multilingualism and cultural diversity they bring to the classroom. Teachers can  “start from a place that leverages all the features of the children’s repertoire, while also showing them when, with whom, where, why to use some features of their repertoire and not others, enabling them to also perform according to the social norms of named languages as used in schools” (García & Kleyn, 2016, p. 15).

Translanguaging can be supported both in the classroom environment (physical space) and in the content of what we teach.  In the classroom, we can include multilingual signs.  We can also incorporate materials that represent multilingual voices and content. These are starting points that model how multilingualism can flow through the classroom, creating a welcoming space for students to draw on their full, rich linguistic and cultural knowledge. In addition to the social and emotional benefits of supporting students to feel valued, embrace their identities, and build self-esteem, there are academic benefits as well. Translanguaging can help students to better understand content and to make connections between their own knowledge (funds of knowledge) and what is being learned at school. It can also support language development of both the dominant and less dominant languages being used at school as well as fostering collaboration among all students at all levels of language proficiency. See the additional resources below for more information and strategies for integrating opportunities for translanguaging.