Proven: The Most Effective Way To Get Your Students To Talk
Expert tips to help your silent class find its voice
It’s inevitable that at some point you’ll have a class that doesn't want to talk. I’ve had so many teachers over the years say that this is their number one issue.
When this happens, you get flustered and feel like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re incapable of teaching these kids or even worse, that you’re in the wrong job.
I get it. I’ve been there too. Sweating in front of a bunch of high school students trying to get a response - any response - and the best I got was a burp in the back.
It gets better. I promise. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, like thousands of others before you, let me tell you, you can turn things around with a few simple, but powerful tweaks. And I’m going to show you how.
Lower Your TTT
Nine times out of ten, when a teacher is complaining that they’re students aren’t talking, it’s because the teacher is talking far too much. Now I understand that might sound really obvious, but it isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I’ll discuss some ways to lower your TTT below, but first. . .
What is TTT?
If you’ve taken any sort of teacher training course for ESL learners, then you’ve probably heard of TTT. If you haven’t, it stands for “teacher talk time.” It’s a sort of arbitrary measure of how much time the teacher talks in any given lesson.
During my CELTA course, the trainer bragged that only 10% of his lesson was TTT, and good for him. But I’d say it’s more reasonable to try to keep TTT to about one-third of your total lesson time.
So where does it trip people up?
TTT isn’t just when you’re introducing the topic or content. You also accrue TTT when you’re asking questions or giving feedback on student answers. Additionally, if you give instructions and check for understanding, these, too, add up as your talk time.
It’s in the above-mentioned areas that many of us lose student momentum and where the unbearable silence creeps in. And to mask that silence, you tend to ask more questions, start rambling or go on a rant about how your students need to participate. Sound familiar?
Instead of replaying that sad scenario on a loop, let me give you some ways that you can lower your TTT and get your students to talk.
Elicit
One of my favorite tricks to get students to talk is to elicit, rather than tell. You can elicit almost anything in class if you set it up right.
For example, if I want to teach my students about love and all the ways to show and say you love someone, I might begin the lesson with a picture of two couples. One that looks really in love, and one that doesn’t.
I might ask, “What differences do you see in these photos?” The students will give their answers and probably point out the body language in each photo.
I might then ask, “What does it mean when someone crosses their arms? What does it mean when someone rests their head in their palm and smiles at you?” And so on.
I want to get them to the point where they’re using descriptions that they’ve come up with to describe love. Then I can introduce them to new ones because I’ve activated their previous knowledge and they’ll be able to make connections to any new content.
Eliciting your students not only lowers your TTT but also triggers what your students already know, which helps them understand and use new content and language.
A great Chinese proverb to help remember to do this goes something like, “Tell me and I forget; teach me and I may remember; involve me and I will learn.”
ICQs and CCQs
ICQs, or instruction checking questions, are questions that check whether your students understand what they are supposed to do next. When done right, they help you avoid having to repeat yourself multiple times; something that eats into your TTT.
Let’s say you set up a task where students are learning how to ask polite questions and how to give polite responses. You give a pair of students a set of questions and a set of answers. You want the students to practice making eye contact, so they should read the question or answer first, then look up and communicate with their partner. After a minute or so, the pairs will receive a sheet of paper with columns to write down which questions and answers they thought were impolite. Together, they have to come up with a reason why they believe the question/answer to be impolite. They have five minutes to do the second task.
Now there are a lot of moving parts to this activity and it’s one where I foresee many students getting confused or needing more directions. You really want to avoid having to stop an activity because too many students are doing the wrong thing, so it’s best to come up with some good ICQs before the students begin their task.
Before you start asking questions, have a strategy of who you’ll ask. I tend to ask one person from as many groups as I can, or if there aren’t that many questions, I try to ask in a star shape, so at least one student per area knows what’s going on and can help relay any information to the other students who are nearby.
So what should you ask?
Just start from the top.
How many people are you working with? One.
As a side note, this might seem like a silly question to ask, but it keeps you from having to ask why Jack is over here with his mates when he should be working with Jill. If you have a student who is a repeat offender, be sure to get him or her to answer this question.
What’s in my hand? Ans: Questions and Answers.
What are you going to do with these? Talk to each other.
Are you going to read to your paper or look at your partner? Look at partner
Do you have a lot of time? No
What should you do when I give you this second piece of paper? Write down which questions and answers are impolite.
What else should you do? Say why we think they’re impolite.
How long do you have to finish this sheet? Five minutes.
I realize this sounds like it’ll take ages to get through, but once your students get used to you asking, it’ll be no more than 30 seconds. It took me a couple of classes to find my flow. I had a lot of “What?” and “I don’t know” in the beginning, especially with high school students, but they got on board because I was unrelenting and they didn’t want to spend all class trying to get through instructions.
CCQs, or concept checking questions, work in the same way but they review what the students have just learned. They work particularly well with tricky grammar or concepts that can have more than one interpretation.
Let’s say you’re teaching your students the past perfect tense. This is one of those tricky grammar things that students have a really hard time with. So we’re going to imagine I’ve just demonstrated what past perfect tense is, when and how to use it. Before I get them started on the next task, I need to make sure they understand what I’ve just taught them.
Many teachers check for understanding by saying “Do you have any questions?” and when no one speaks up they move on. This might seem like the best way to cut down on your TTT, but it actually does you a disservice and will almost always require you to stop the activity or task and provide more explanations.
To avoid this, think about what hiccups your students might face when trying to understand this concept. If you’re new to teaching, a quick google search will yield thousands of results of common problems students face with any particular grammar point and you can build your questions from there.
If I have the sentence “When James called, I had been cleaning my house since 2.” what questions could I ask the student to make sure they understand past perfect? To do this, you should understand why someone would use the past perfect over the simple past. The easy answer is to organize their thoughts in a way that clearly shows the sequence of events.
So I could ask,
1. What happened first, the person started to clean their room or James called? The person started to clean their room.
2. Was the person finished cleaning when James called? No.
3. Is the person finished now? Yes.
Here are some other tips for perfecting CCQs.
Avoid Choral Chants
Getting your students to repeat after you in unison is what you’d call a choral chant. Choral chanting gives teachers a false sense of student participation because it sounds like everyone is involved. Like sugar, you should avoid choral chants when you can and only use it sparingly.
The problem here is simple. When everyone “speaks” at one time, you don’t know if they understand or if they’re just mimicking everyone around them. Eventually, you’ll realize that several students didn’t understand and you’ll have to reteach the content. This is a colossal waste of time and could be easily avoided.
Don’t ask questions or check for understanding with the whole class. Instead, use the CCQ method above.
Are choral chants ever useful?
Absolutely.
When you’re introducing new vocabulary to students and you want to get them familiar with pronunciation and how to shape their mouths, there’s nothing wrong with a little choir. But if you want to check for errors, call out a few students to say the words on their own so you can spot and correct any issues.
Think-Pair-Share
Think-pair-share is the act of letting students run their thoughts or answers by a partner before doing it in front of the class. Speaking in a foreign language is intimidating all on its own. If you put a student on the spot to answer a question about something they’ve just learned, chances are they’ll freeze. Giving them time to check things over with a peer will usually help avoid that.
One of the more common mistakes I see teachers make when they implement TPS is they’ll say “Now check your answers with a partner.” Then a few minutes later they’ll go through the questions as a class and the first few students who share their answer get it wrong. This tends to send a shockwave through the class and makes everyone tense up. Then, when students are called on, they’ll say “I don’t know” rather than risk giving the wrong answer.
There are a couple of things you can do to avoid this from happening.
First, get in the habit of requiring your students to understand why the answer is what it is. Sometimes it’s difficult for students to come up with the vocabulary to explain why, so try to model it for them while you’re going through the content as a class.
Second, monitor the class while they are doing the task. Make a mental or physical note of groups that got correct answers so you can call on them later. If a lot of groups answered a question wrong, you can make a note of that too so you can address it during feedback. But by calling on students you know have the right answer you sneakily reinforce the behavior you want to see which is students feeling confident about participating in class discussions.
Pace
Pacing is one of those things that even seasoned teachers struggle with. To get it right, you really have to know your students and their hangups. You also have to know yourself and your own hangups. Like how often do you find yourself going on rants or getting side-tracked? Do your students tend to take a long time to transition from one task to the next? These are all things that affect the pacing of your lesson.
When your lesson is moving along too fast or too slow, you tend to lose a good chunk of your audience and no duh. You’re either boring the daylights out of them or you might as well be speaking Martian.
Pacing takes a good plan and a decent amount of practice. But being aware of it in the first place is a great place to start. One rookie mistake when thinking about pacing is to be pleased that you didn’t get through all of your material. Many teachers will take that as a sign that students were diving so deep into the content they couldn’t cover it all. That may be true some of the time, but if you routinely cut the lesson short due to one of your activities eating into most of your class time, you’re leaving the students open for more confusion, and consequently, less desire to talk.
If you have an objective for each lesson, meet it within the timeframe you’ve defined. If students aren’t responding to an activity, learn to improvise or simply move on to something that’s more engaging.
Avoid Flying with the Fastest
Isn’t it exciting when a student is on the ball and ready to answer all your questions? It makes you feel like you’re actually doing something; like some real teaching and learning is happening.
But what that doesn’t do is help the rest of your students. I get it though, I mean what are you supposed to do, ignore the only student who seems interested? Pull teeth to get the others to answer even though there’s someone willing and ready?
I know that you want to nurture your motivated student, but the message you’re sending to the other students is that their voices don’t matter (since you’re not asking for their input anyway). Over time, this erodes your students’ willingness to talk and perpetuates a cycle of silence.
It’s important to get in the habit of seeking the thoughts and ideas of everyone in the class, even if it takes a few of them a little longer to answer. When it comes to language learning, silence doesn’t always mean an unwillingness to talk, it could just be that the student needs time to form the answer in his or her head first. Give them some space to do that.
Give +POSITIVE+ Feedback
Let’s get one thing straight: You don’t need to be a cheerleader to be an, erm, cheerleader. What I mean is, you don’t have to be overly fake in order to inspire your students to talk.
Positive feedback is a powerful practice in class when used properly. But it can also be dismissive if your go-to phrase is “Great job!”
The purpose of feedback is two-fold. Get the students who are on task and doing well to keep doing what they’re doing, and try to lure the other students to want those praises as well. I never thought this would work with older kids, but it absolutely does. They’re not immune to needing some praise here and there, and they’ll actually work to get it.
I’ve frequently watched teachers fall into the trap of getting frustrated or angry when students aren’t participating. Then they’ll go into a long, drawn-out rant (of which their students probably only understand half) where they scold the students on their lack of participation and threaten to give pop quizzes or other meaningless tasks.
Not only does that eat into your TTT, but it isn’t conducive to the environment you’re trying to build; one in which your students feel safe to talk and are encouraged to do so.
Take It One Step At A Time
If you look at this list and think you’ll have to change everything you do in your lesson, don’t.
Take it like you’re going on a diet, or better yet, a lifestyle change (hehe). You never want to go cold turkey and change everything at once, it never works, does it?
Same thing here. Take one thing from this list and focus on it for a few weeks. Once you feel like you’ve gotten the hang of it, add something else.
The point here is not to make you feel like you’re inadequate or that you need to change everything you’re doing. The point is merely to bring your attention to some solutions that will help you build an environment in which your students feel confident enough to talk.
And while we’re on the subject, check out these FIRE debate topics that are guaranteed to get your students talking.
What are some ways you get your students talking without increasing your own talk time? Comment below.