What Works for Oral Language Instruction

Now that you have an understanding of the sub-skills for oral language, you have many clues for the types of strategies and activities to help students develop oral language. In brief, any activities that engage students in those sub-skills will contribute to oral language. If you use those activities with text, you help students develop their reading comprehension.

Here is the caveat: You need to use strategies for ALL the sub-skills.

In my observation of teachers and in my review of instructional plans for thousands of reading tutors, however, I noted that teachers for younger students tend to focus only on basic (non-nuanced) vocabulary and phonological skills. As students advance to upper elementary, teachers tend to focus on connotative/nuanced vocabulary and syntax. Not until students get to middle or high school do teachers begin to focus on morphological skills and pragmatics. In part, I believe, they do this because simple vocabulary and phonological skills are least complex to grasp and morphological skills and pragmatics are most complex. This is a mistake.

Students at all ages can learn—or begin learning—all the oral language sub-skills. The more complex skills, such as pragmatics, and the more complex concepts, such context-dependent expectations, might be presented in simple forms for younger children, but children can learn them if the teacher uses effective and appropriate strategies.

Although you can use many different activities to teach oral language skills, effective activities can be grouped within four types of strategies.

Five Strategies for Teaching Oral Language Skills

• Modeling
• Analysis
• Practice with correction and reflection
• Discussion
• Explicit instruction

Truly, all five strategies are necessary to help students develop their oral language skills, which means you need to design activities that employ all five strategies. Although it is possible to address all the strategies through one carefully designed, comprehensive activity, you might need several activities. The only strategy that you will use all the time is modeling.

Modeling: Your primary responsibility as a reading teacher is to conscientiously and consistently model the language use that is appropriate for an event, setting, context, or culture. Children learn to speak according to what they hear, so your job is to make sure they hear appropriate language use. Exposure to language leads to familiarity, which, in turn, leads to students’ ability to use language in that same manner.

Under the modeling strategy, you are using language in a certain manner and helping students understand what you are doing and why. How do you want students to communicate? What types of language usage or patterns do you want them to learn? If you don’t model it, they won’t learn it. Modeling is not restricted to specific times, activities, or content areas. It is what you do all the time, every time, and in every place. If students can hear you speak, you are modeling language use.

Normally, you are communicating with students in an academic context, within the culture of learning that you create in your classroom. This means you need to use academic language: precise and concise explanations, grammatically correct sentences, and standard vocabulary that avoids colloquial or idiomatic expressions. As you engage students individually or in non-classroom settings, you might modify your language use. In either case, you need to explicitly describe the language expectations, model their use, and prompt students to adhere to those expectations.

Analysis: Analysis means developing conclusions about language use. To help students develop oral language skills, you teach them to perform three types of analysis: (a) Word Analysis, which is analyzing word parts and their effect on meaning; (b) Text Analysis, which is analyzing the way the author or characters use language; and (c) Message Analysis, which is analyzing the author’s intention, purpose, and content.

To a certain degree, analysis strategies use text to provide modeling, and activities engage students in analyzing how language is used in the text. Activities provide students with opportunities to do one or more types of analysis. As you design or reflect on your instructional activities, make sure that students have the opportunity to do all three types.

Practice with correction and reflection: Oral language is a set of skills. Like other skills, such as playing an instrument or learning a craft, development takes guidance, opportunities for practice, and reflection on results supported by correction. Which is followed by more guidance, more practice, and more reflection supported by correction.

Students need many opportunities to communicate (whether in speech or writing), and you, the teacher, need to provide correction and help students think about how they are using language in a specific event, setting, context, or culture. As with modeling, you do this all the time. However, you can also design specific activities to provide practice with feedback.

You need to make a judgment call when providing feedback. On the one hand, if students understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate language (as determined by the event, setting, context, or culture) but choose to use inappropriate language, the correction may be punitive. More commonly, if students have not yet learned that difference—or have not learned the reason for the difference—the correction needs to be instructional with the opportunity to try again. Language takes a lifetime of practice.

Discussion: Discussion brings all the strategies together. The teacher provides questions for student response and facilitates students asking and responding to questions from each other. Questions address various levels from Bloom’s Taxonomy, Depth of Knowledge, or similar systems of interacting with text.

Explicit instruction: Language follows a series of patterns: patterns for word use, patterns of sentence structure, patterns for volume and tone, etc. With explicit instruction, you teach students the patterns that are appropriate for various settings, events, contexts, and cultures. You teach them, “In this place, for this purpose, here is how you say….”

(I will address discussion and explicit instruction in this post.)

Strategy	Sample Activity Types	Oral Language Sub-skills
Modeling	Continuous demonstration by the teacher or other adults	Vocabulary Syntax Morphological Skills Pragmatics
Analysis	Creating word groups and modifying words Rhyming and “word play” Close reading Writing to prompts Discussion Character analysis Direct instruction Cause and effect study	Vocabulary Syntax Morphological Skills Pragmatics Phonological Skills
Practice with Reflection and Correction	Teaching language patterns Guided oral reading / choral reading Reading and writing skits or plays Revising and rewording Writing to prompts Short-answer questions Direct instruction	Vocabulary Syntax Morphological Skills Pragmatics
Discussion	Writing to prompts followed by student discussion Graphic organizers followed by student discussion Student-created questions followed by student discussion Text analysis followed by student discussion	Vocabulary Syntax Morphological Skills Pragmatics Phonological Skills
Explicit Instruction	Teaching language patterns Direct instruction Revising and rewording Direct instruction Discussion Character analysis	All sub-skills