Dear Fli,

Sometimes I worry that I’m the one doing all the talking in my class, not my students. What can I do to make sure that I am getting information across, but that my students still have lots of opportunities to speak and practice their English? I’m not sure how to get across all the content that I need to without talking a lot myself. Sometimes it seems the only way to keep the energy up in the classroom seems to be to “put on a show” and this means that I hear my voice a lot more than I hear the students’ voices some nights. Help!

- Need To Get Out of the Spotlight

Dear Need To Get Out of the Spotlight:

This is a challenge that many classroom teachers face and it is also recognized as a block to student learning—especially in an ESL classroom where, as you say, students need to be practicing their language skills. One of the first things you can do is to make friends with silence, so that you don’t feel that you need to jump in and fill the empty space after you ask a question. Studies have shown that teachers typically wait one second or less for students to start a reply to their question before calling on anther student or supplying information related to the question themselves. In studies where teachers were asked to incorporate longer than typical wait times, the action led to "more active participation in lessons by a larger percentage of the students." If you can become more comfortable with silence than your students are, you will have a valuable tool to encourage them to jump in and say something.

Other classroom strategies can encourage more student-to-student discourse and less teacher-directed/teacher-dominated conversation. A few things to try:

· Group work—have students work in small groups on collaborative projects, encouraging them to converse in English to accomplish their tasks.

· Avoid close ended questions

· Set up your classroom in a circle, rather than in rows or another format where everyone is facing you.

· Walk away from the discussion sometimes, rather than “hovering” over it. This gives your students space to talk to each other.

· Adopt a communicative approach (Communicative language teaching makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication)

· Try information gap activities. Information gap activities are widely used in ESOL instruction. At the most basic level, two people share information to complete a task. In one-way information gap activities, one person has all the information (e.g., one learner gives directions to a location and the other plots the route out on a map). In two-way gap activities, both learners have information to share to complete the activity. Two-way information gap activities have been shown to facilitate more interaction than one-way information gap tasks (Ellis, 1999).

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