Oral language: how we first communicate with others and interact with the world around us sets the stage for all of our subsequent learning. Structured teaching for oral language development has powerful outcomes for student learning across the content curriculum.

  • Turn & Talk
    Turn & Talk

    Student partners respond and discuss ideas prompted by a focus question provided by the teacher.
  • Brainstorm
    Brainstorm

    Peers quickly generate multiple responses to a focus question.
  • Paraphrase
    Paraphrase

    Peers work together on a variety of ways of listening and responding to a partner as they talk about a focus question.
  • Write-Pair-Share
    Write-Pair-Share

    Peers quickly write down a response to a focus question provided by the teacher, then read the brief response.
  • Elaborate
    Elaborate

    Peers work as partners to listen and discuss ideas by extending responses of a partner.

In this set of resources, you can explore various classrooms where teachers are using explicit strategies and participation structures for oral language development, you can delve into each of these participation structures in detail, you can download tools and resources to support your own instruction and assessment for observing students, and you can join the conversation about these resources with other teachers. We hope that everything on this site will contribute powerfully to a refinement and transformation of your teaching practice across the grade levels and the school curriculum.

This site is part of the New Teacher Center’s approach to mentoring and teacher continuous learning, and is intended to help educators invest in our own knowledge base and reconnect to the commitments that brought us to the profession.