The California ELD Standards Companion, Grades 3-5. Jim Burke

       As in Grades K–2, the emphasis on speaking and listening continues, but the expectations and routines should become more complex. Although basic routines can be reviewed at the beginning of the school year, ELLs should be taught more complex skills such how to clarify ideas, question, summarize, and provide detailed explanations for their opinions. Providing more complex sentence frames connected to these skills—such as What do you mean? or I have a question about ______ for clarification and Based on ______, I infer that _______ or I hypothesize that ______ for predicting—are important to prompt student thinking and language can scaffold these complex skills.

       ELLs should also move from merely one-on-one interactions and into collaborative or group-worthy tasks. One way to have student practice complexity, language, and collaboration is by using reciprocal teaching roles, where students are taught how to lead conversations on their own with roles such as summarization, questioning or clarification, predicting, and connecting.

       In order to move away from silent classrooms and into collaboration, language must be thoughtfully planned for by the teacher in advance and connected to the curriculum. One way to do this is by identifying the most cognitively and linguistically demanding skills or tasks being taught and by providing stopping points for student talk during these times. Another key shift within this grade span is that students should be required to talk across content areas and not merely during language arts or ELD time (see Vignette 4.3).

       Emerging—Small groups are given images of resources that accompany the day’s lesson and are prompted to draw on the images to capture what they learned during the lesson. Use sentence frames such as I think because ______ or I see because ______.

       Expanding—Students may respond to sentence frames about the images, such as This image shows ______, This image is important because ______, or This image is related ______.

       Bridging—Students may study images, including photographs and illustrations and then discuss in small groups or pairs with questions or sentence prompts to guide them.

       Affirming others: teacher or student comments that reflect a positive behavior (i.e., turn-taking) or a response or question from someone else in the conversation that exemplifies or clarifies the gist of the discussion

       Asking relevant questions or adding pertinent information: teacher or student questions and/or comments that move forward the group’s understanding of the concepts being studied. These are usually open ended, and can be text dependent, clarifying, and/or making connections questions or comments (to oneself or others, to other texts, to other ideas).

       Building on other’s responses: student comments that take into account what others have said in the discussion, and linking their comments to those points

       Collaborative conversations: discussing ideas and working jointly with others to develop new thinking. Students take the remarks of others and add details or further develop the thoughts.

       Multiple exchanges: discussions where one idea is considered and discussed by several persons, growing richer and more complex as new ideas or examples are added, instead of the typical question-answer, new question-answer pattern that limits discussion

       Providing useful feedback: offering specific, helpful suggestions to a student in order to improve his or her thinking or work product. Examples include, “You did a good job on ______; I think you should ______ because it would help ______.”

       Speaking audibly: to speak loudly enough to be heard but not so loudly as to be shouting or distorting the message

       Sustained dialogue: collaborative conversations in which students create new thinking by working with others to add details or further develop thoughts on the topic of discussion

       Turn-taking roles: various ways for students to consciously listen to others, say their contribution and then listen again. These roles can include Think-Pair-Share, Reciprocal Teaching, using Equity sticks, etc.

       Using learned phrases: opportunities for students to share their ideas and thoughts by using patterns or prompts to frame their oral language. These can come from pattern drills, sentence frames, and other sources.