Hello colleagues, I've previously shared Jeff Zwiers' Conversation Skills Poster, which features sentence starters and responses that learners can draw upon to build their academic language skills during discussions. The poster is available here Cultivating Constructive Conversations.
Following Zwiers ideas, I've created cards with similar sentence starters for classroom discussions. Today, during a civic engagement unit, we focused on sentence starters used to infer and predict information about an editorial from the local newspaper about the recent measles outbreaks.
During their conversations, these high intermediate and advanced learners could choose to practice one or more of the following sentence starters:
1. I predict that…
2. I can infer that… because…
3. I think that…
4. I think we could infer that…
5. I bet that… because...
6. I hypothesize that…
7. Based on…, I guess that…
8. The evidence points to the idea that…
9. We could assume that…
10. The picture (or other graphic) suggests that…
Among others, we have academic sentence starter cards supporting students to:
- affirm the ideas of others
- analyze information
- compare and contrast
- disagree politely
- identify the main idea
Over the last few weeks, I've been asking students to send me a brief (one or two sentence) audio recording of themselves using one of the sentence starters. In this way, I am able to offer feedback to each student on their language, including aspects of pronunciation.
This week we'll also be using sentence starters to identify causes and effects.
I welcome your comments and questions on this approach as well as your thoughts on additional ways to support learners to build their academic conversation skills.
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP