Strategies for Developing ELLs' Oral Language

I support oral language development by encouraging my students to talk, to talk and talk and talk. And what I find a lot of times is that a student who is very, very quiet in his or her classroom will talk when they're taken to a different setting perhaps, and they're brought to my classroom and it's just that child and maybe a couple of peers. They're much more open to using their English skills in that environment. So, one of the things that I do with my students with starting in fourth grade is that I have a lunch date that's a certain day of the week. I have lunch with my fourth graders on Wednesday, my fifth graders on Friday, and they come to my room for lunch and they will talk almost the entire time.  

But I mix that up because before they get in there, I have these picture cards. They cover academic topics from Science to Social Studies. It'll be a picture of a volcano or a picture of a beach. And the deal is they can pick anyone off the table, but they have to talk about it for 30 seconds. And so we'll chat real quickly. “Are there any words that you need me to write down that you want to use?” And we'll do that. And those kids, even after they test out of EL services, they still want to come back for lunch even if it requires that they're going to have to use those picture cards to talk because they think that that is fun. They have no idea that we are working on their speaking skills the entire time that they're in there.