LITERACY

SPEAKING AND LISTENING

SPEAKING & LISTENING

Creating a climate for talk – practical tips

1. Thank you

2. Hand over the chair

3. When someone gives a wrong or an irrelevant answer

4. When someone makes a good point

5. Groups set up for success

6. Think pair share

7. Different types of questioning

8. No hands up

9. Ask for more

10. Sit in the crowd

11. Facilitating group work

12. Role models

13. Invite pupils to respond to each other’s answers

14. Star of the day or week

15. Catch them doing well

REFLECTING ON SPEAKING AND LISTENING

Card sort

The cards can be used in a number of different ways to promote speaking and listening activities.

Raising the profile of speaking and listening skills

Ask pupils to sort the cards under different headings.

oListening

oTalking to a group

oTalking with a group

oTalking about talk

Or

oSkills used in the English classroom

oSkills used across the curriculum

oSkills used in everyday life

Self – assessment

Ask pupils to self –assess by sorting the cards under headings such as:

oThis is a strength

oThis is an area for improvement

Or

oVery confident

oQuite confident

oNot very confident

Help pupils to identify a target and keep the relevant card as a reminder for the next piece of speaking and listening acitivity.

Peer assessment

Select cards relevant to making a presentation and discuss them with the group. Pupils use these to form the basis of feedback to each other after listening to their presentation.

Using the cards as success criteria.

Using the cards as a way of improving a presentation.

Set up a Socratic discussion, where one group has their discussion in the middle of the class, with other pupils observing, using the cards to look out for a particular skill and making a note of it, so that the class can give positive feedback.

WHY IS SPEAKING AND LISTENING IMPORTANT?Do you think speaking and listening is…

-As important as reading?

-Less important than reading?

-More important than reading?

-As important as writing?

-Less important than writing?

-More important than writing?

WRITING

WRITING IS HARD An activity that allows students to recognise that everyone finds writing difficult at some stage in their life.

The students could then decide on a set of statements expressing their views. These could be placed at the front of their exercise books for them to refer back to.

a. Writing is hard for everyone, when I find it difficult I will…

b. What’s enjoyable about finishing a tough writing task is…

c. To be a writer you have to be…

d. Something that works for me is to…

SMALL TWEAKS AND FINE TUNING

Read the piece of writing.

What are its strengths?

What are its weaknesses?

If you could make a maximum of four small editing suggestions , what would they be? Write them in.

Once the students have written in the suggestions, show them the edited copy and ask them to compare it with their own. Ask them what they think about the suggestions and their own.

POST-IT NOTE PLANNING

This is an approach to extended writing across the curriculum.

Small groups plan writing using post-it notes to identify each point they might want to make and then they move the post-it notes around on a large sheet of paper to come up with a final shape or structure for the writing.

A very good way of helping pupils to share ideas and it’s adaptable.

Examples of how it can be done differently:

Give all groups the same question, essay title or task. Ask them to make points on post-it notes. After 10-15 minutes, get each group to send an envoy to find out what other groups have done and bring back specially interesting or useful ideas. The job of the group being visited by the envoy is to explain their points.

Ask the groups to come up with as many ideas as they can. Then make them select their most important or useful points, discarding the less important ones.

While they are working on their post-it note planning, throw in one or two additional ideas or challenges, to push them towards what might constitute a good response and add in an element of complexity or greater challenge.

You could use the planning activity without it leading directly into writing, just as a way of focusing on developing pupils’ understanding about how to plan for writing.

In preparation for writing in exam conditions, begin to shift the emphasis away from group planning, towards pupils beginning to use what they’ve learned to plan on their own.

IDEA POTSThis method allows pupils to weigh up ideas for a piece of writing, without actually having to generate the ideas themselves. It allows them to concentrate on the process of selecting the most interesting and useful points.

For example,

Give pupils a pile of cards, each containing an idea that could be used in answering an essay title or in a piece of writing. Set out some pots with labels on. Ask pupils to sift the cards and put them into the relevant pots. For instance:

For argument writing, the pots could be FOR and AGAINST a proposition.

For a literary essay on poetry, the pots could be FORM & STRUCTURE, LANGUAGE, VOICE, THEMES.

For a geography piece, the pots could be PHYSICAL FEATURES, PROCESSES, CAUSES, IMPACT, CASE STUDY EXAMPLES.

BEYOND THE WRITING FRAMEScaffolding is about offering the minimum

support that will allow them to learn about the writing process.

Here are a few ‘light touch’ ways of providing support in the early stages of writing:

Stage the task. Suggest that they start with the first part and don’t worry about the next stages till they’ve completed that. Have writing bursts, silent writing for 10-15 minutes, to complete sections, followed by a pause to reflect and share.

Make some choices for pupils, for example give them a tight word count, or a first sentence, or a last line to aim for, or tell them they must try to incorporate certain words or phrases.

Highlight key aspects of the task.

Pause during the lesson to offer brief examples of what a range of pupils are writing, to help stimulate ideas.

Model parts of the process yourself, ideally showing more than one way of tackling it, so pupils can see that alternative choices are possible.

MATCHING THE STRUCTURE TO THE QUESTION From your knowledge of different subject areas, come up with a range of different tasks that use the formulations below, finishing off the sentence starters. Add other formulations from any other subjects and write typical tasks.

READING

DECODING AND MAKING SENSE OF TEXTS What’s the problem?

With pupils who struggle to decode, it’s worth spending some time both listening to them read a variety of texts and reading to them, as well as talking together about what the text is about.

What are the strategies?

Share with pupils some of the strategies readers use to make sense of texts and to help them when they come across an unfamiliar or tricky word.

For example:

- Looking at the pictures.

- Using their existing knowledge of the text.

- Using their knowledge of similar texts.

- The context of the phrase or sentence of text as a whole.

- Starting with the whole word and breaking it down into its beginning and end parts.

- Sequencing the individual sounds in words, blending them together.

-Making good guesses.

-Reading back and reconsidering.

-Asking another reader.

PRE-READING PREPARATION With pupils who struggle to make sense of texts at the level of decoding, it can be helpful to spend some time preparing the ground.

Give each pupil a fragment to explore. If the text has a number of clauses, extract the main clause so pupils have a basic understanding of the text before they face the original.

Ask pupils to explore, sort and group a collection of key words from the text you are going to read.

Speculate about the text based on the title, accompanying images, graphs etc.

Thinking around the topic: ask pupils working in pairs or small groups to list key issues that might be of interest or importance.

Make links to previous reading in a similar vein or on a similar topic.

Summarising: with texts likely to prove a real challenge, give pupils a brief oral summary or overview of the key points it raises.

After reading, draw on this pre reading preparation to support pupils in exploring and analysing the full text.

INTERPRETATION AND RESPONSE Time to develop a response – living with a text.

This is useful for developing pupils’ ability to respond to a text independently, allowing them time to mull over their response to a text over a period of time, without teacher intervention.

- Choose a short text which offers your pupils a reasonable challenge.

-Over the course of a week’s lessons, pupils read and respond to a text in anyway they choose, writing there different comments. The activity works well when pupils are asked not to read over their earlier work, but to begin afresh each time, only reading over their three responses in the final lesson.

-After reading all their earlier responses, pupils draft a more considered response to the text.

POST-IT NOTE CRITIC

This is a simple strategy to help pupils develop independence in reading and responding to texts.

Pupils are provided with post-it notes to record their response to and ask questions about a chapter (or section of text) that they have been asked to read independently. Pupils use the post-it note both to mark the particular passage and briefly note down their response.

When you want to offer a prompt you could suggest the following:

As you read this chapter, use your post-it notes to mark a passage which:

-You really enjoyed (intrigued you/made you feel a strong emotion).

-You think is interesting in terms of its style of writing.

-Made you wonder about what might happen next.

You can also use your post-it notes to mark:

-Anything that strikes you as interesting or worth sharing with other readers.

-Anything that puzzled you that you didn’t understand.

-Any questions you have.

-Words which you would like to check the meaning of, after you have finished reading.

DEBATE AROUND THE ROOM – RESPONDING TO INTERPRETATIONS OF A TEXT

This activity forces all pupils to reflect on, and come to a decision about, their opinion or an interpretation of a text, even if they initially struggle to put it into words.

Before the lesson, label different areas of the room, agree, disagree, don’t know.

Devise a cluster of interpretative statements about the text – provocative or very definite views work particularly well. For example:

The Hunger Games is nothing more than a teen romance.

GM crops are the only way to solve world hunger.

Human activity has no impact on climate change.

Calculators have made mental arithmetic redundant.

Organ donation should be compulsory.

Stalin came to power because the conditions in Russia allowed it, not because of his own qualities as a leader.

MAKING A JUDGEMENT – EVALUATING INTERPRETATIONS

Support pupils in learning how to evaluate and discriminate between interpretations by providing them with 12-20 statements about a text, all of which have some validity.

Variations

You can vary the activity by asking pupils to:

-Select three statements to share with a partner.

-Choose one statement to use as the basis for their own response.

-Choose the statement they think is least interesting or valid and explaining why.

-Group statements (for example, all those which are about language, express a personal response and so on).

-Use as many statements as they want to put together an outline for an essay.

MAKING A JUDGEMENT – EVALUATING INTERPRETATIONS

Read ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ and spend two or three minutes mulling over your first thoughts and ideas about it. You could make a note of your thoughts as key words, bullet points, questions or annotations around the text if you find it helpful.

Read the statements and choose three you find particularly interesting or thought-provoking to share with a partner. Make sure you give each other enough time to explain the reasons for your choices – you can help your partner by asking questions such as ‘Can you tell me a bit more about why you chose that statement?’

Which statement do you think is the least interesting or relevant? Why is that? Can you make changes to the statement to make it more interesting? Work with your partner to try to do this.

Try grouping the statements in as many different ways as you can. For example, can you make a group of statements which comment on language? Or a group which give a personal response? You could compare your groupings with those made by other pupils in your class.

Use the statements to help you write a response to the poem. You could do this by:

Choosing just one statement to use as the starting point for an answer.Using as many statements as you want to put together an outline for an essay.