How Partner Talk Can Support Oral Language Development

What I'm seeing when I walk into a classroom, I get so excited when I see children engage, children turning and talking to one another, describing, instead of the teacher just asking one question to one person, one person, one person, she says," Ah, we're going to use our four Ts. I want you to think about this concept, describe it to your partner, turn and talk. Now I want you to report back to me. Tell me about it." So what I see there is instead of one person getting an opportunity, all the students get an opportunity.

And when I was walking in a classroom, I saw that they were asking one by one and the other students were basically waiting patiently, but when we have them think, turn and talk, then everyone's having a discussion. Everyone is expressing what they know, what they learned, and the teacher can monitor that, and then they can report back. And as a teacher, I might kind of add to it or adjust how they interpreted it. And so I think that's so important that we ... I love that when I see teachers introducing something, having the students process, reflect, turn and talk about it, come back, let's report back as a group, and then extending that into writing, because then I had listening, speaking, reading, and writing all right there. And so it's like kind of those routines. And I get very excited because I see they're using, they're reflecting, they're using their oral language, they're summarizing, and they're writing. So I love that.