Raise your hand if you love to read! Now, raise your hand if you love to read journal articles... about language acquisition... and about how students learn and use language in math! Meeeeeee!! I love to read articles, books, anything I can get my hands on. That's how I learn.
One article I read recently is called "Instructional Strategies for Developing Oral Language." Sounds exciting, right? Trust me, IT IS! Oral language is incredibly important for developing reading comprehension in any content area. "It is the fuel that feeds the fire of comprehension, as the language that is heard must be understood before the language that is read can be decoded and understood," states the author Sue McCandlish.
We need to remember that ALL of our students are language learners -- math language learners. Math has a language all its own, not only it terms of vocabulary but also text structure (see my earlier blog post on using literacy strategies in math).
What exactly is oral language? In the classroom, oral language is academic conversations where students hear and verbally use language. These conversations must involve turn-taking between speakers, ideally with each person speaking 2 or more times, according to McCandlish.
The article states, "the 'thread' of oral language [must be] neatly woven into students' learning throughout the day." How do we encourage these types of conversations in our math classrooms?
Enter: The Triad Protocols!
Yes, the title sounds a *little* scary, but trust me, this is a fantastic way to implement academic conversations. We first learned about Triad Protocols at the WIDA conference last year in a presentation given by Dr. Marina Dewees and Signe Nelson.
Bascially, a "triad" is a group of 3 people. A "protocol" is a script students follow which targets a specific language structure or vocabulary use.
Here is an example:
In 5th grade, we have used this template for working with number patterns and sequencing. We were targeting the language of asking and answering the question "How do you know?"
Most recently, we used an adapted version of this template for writing a number using the value of a digit. Here's a snapshot of the protocol students used:
Here are some other protocol ideas from Dewees and Nelson:
We often incorporate a triad protocol into our large group instruction, but it would also work well in small group instruction.
**UPDATE** Check out a video with some of our 5th grade students using the Triad Protocol! Yay!
What strategies do you use to weave oral language into your daily math instruction?
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