“Oral communication is the process of expressing information or ideas by word of mouth. Learn more about the types and benefits of oral communication, and find out how you can improve your own oral communication abilities”

This year I began tutoring a Grade 3 student for both math and language. Through this process I have realized the importance of communication, not just communication from the student, but also communication as a teacher. Part of communication requires us to have both listening and speaking skills, and these are important foundations to develop as students and people.  In the final chunk of our time in classes before our teaching block, we have been looking at oral communication. I have really enjoyed this strand because there are many different interactive activities that fulfill the expectations.

Below are the expectations for the Oral Communication strand in the Ontario Curriculum

Overall Expectations:

1. Listen in order to understand and respond appropriately in a variety of situations for a variety of purposes;
2. Use speaking skills and strategies appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes;
3. Reflect on and identify their strengths as listeners and speakers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful in oral communication situations.

Let’s Talk about Listening Article

One resource that I looked at for Oral Communication was found on Edugains and is called “Let’s talk about listening”. It argues that listening is the most important skill for “obtaining comprehensible input in one’s first and any subsequent languages. It is a pervasive communicative event: we listen considerably more than we read, write, or speak”. Listening is an active process and something that must be practiced. This is why it is an important part of the Ontario Curriculum under oral communication. Since talking and discussing play a central role in the classroom it is important to teach students to be effective listeners, which will help develop critical thinkers. I have found this to be particularly true in all subjects in school. When I have worked with students I tutor and in my placement I have tried to generate discussion and ask thought provoking questions to encourage deeper thinking and understanding of the material we are studying.

 The article explains how important it is for teachers to model good listening for their students to encourage the same behaviour from their students. This message of teachers modelling the behaviour they expect of students is one that I have found to be very important and applicable in the past three weeks in my own experience. The article highlights the relationship between listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This makes incorporating the different strands into activities very easy for teachers. The article includes activities that can encourage listening comprehension (ex. Quick Writes, Graffiti, ReQuest, Inside-Outside).

Debates: Where Speaking and Listening Come First Article

Another great activity to foster student’s oral communication skills is debates. We looked at an article that discusses the benefits of conducting debates in the class to help engage students and develop speaking, reading, and writing skills. It explains how debates can support student’s critical thinking through their research and reasoning of evidence when they have to be able to argue both points of view. When students debate with each other, it encourages positive collaboration between peers. Debates can aid in developing students listening and speaking abilities because peers need to listen to students on their debate team in order to form ideas to counter. When students are engaged in a debate their speaking skills are critical so they can communicate their thoughts effectively, they need to be clear and specific with their points, as well as helps develop their vocabulary.

I really like the idea of using debates in the classroom, I think it can help students not only develop their reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, but also how they work with their peers. Students ability to learn to develop substantial arguments from evidence can help them when it comes to persuasive writing, as well as reading closely and thinking critically about what they have read.

Resources

Here is a list of some resources I found that offer some great activities to promote oral communication in the classroom. Many of these activities can be modified to suit your own class as well as grade level.

Go to Activities for Conversations in Class:

·      This is a list of easy activities that can spark conversations in the classroom, and can be modified for different subjects.

·      These can be done is small groups or in pairs

The Conversation Station

·      This is typically done for primary grade

·      This is another activity that has students talk in small groups, where a table is set up with various prompts

·      As an extension to this, students can pair up and do a written aspect where they write about what they heard their group mates say.

Video Resources

            In this past week, we looked at some resources that had a wide range of educational videos to show in class. I found a video from the National Film Board that I will use in my teaching block for my unit on Residential Schools. The video I chose is called “Sisters and Brothers”, and is a short trailer of indigenous children going to residential schools, as well as the hunting of the buffalo. The focus on the trailer is Indigenous culture that had been lost due to the residential schools. Indigenous people created the film, and shows black and white clips with background music. There is no oral conversation or narrative in the trailer, which is a great opportunity for students to use inferring skills. I plan on using this as part of my introduction to the unit, and will accompany the video with a discussion and written part.