According to Diane August (2002), a senior research scientist at
the Center for Applied Linguistics, English Language Learners (ELLs)
spend less than two percent of their school day in oral language
development. Worse yet, when ELLs are speaking in school, it is often
not about academic topics or rigorous content. Instead, according to
Gibbons (2002), ELLs are relegated to shallow forms of speech, such as
those which require only one-word responses.
This lack of academic oral language practice is detrimental to the
acquisition of English, as well as to the access of grade-level content
area material, which are both mandated by Title III of the No Child Left
Behind Act. Similarly, the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority
Children and Youth (2006) suggests that oral language development is the
foundation of literacy. In order for ELLs to become proficient in the
basics of English, as well as grade-level academic English, it is
imperative that they be given repeated and more complex opportunities to
speak about academic topics across the school day.
One way to systemically create awareness around the importance of
academic oral language development, or "academic talk," is to
train teachers in ELL shadowing. During this process, teachers monitor
the academic language and listening opportunities of ELLs at five-minute
intervals over a two-hour period of time. This process allows teachers
to become more reflective about their own practice, especially as they
see how few opportunities ELLs typically do have for academic oral
After participating in shadowing, teachers become much more
sensitive to embedding "academic talk" into their lesson
design, and school district office and school site administrators begin
to tailor professional development around increasing opportunities for
academic oral language development. In this article I will explain why
academic oral language development is important and how to embed ELL
shadowing into either a teacher education program, a district, an
individual school, or a county office of education staff development
The Importance of Academic Oral Language Development
Historically, the four literacy domains--listening, speaking,
reading, and writing--have been taught separately, with an emphasis on
reading and writing as the "academic domains." For ELLs,
however, this process of teaching each of the domains as segmented
components of language is not as effective. The students' needs are
great and they have little time to waste in closing the literacy gap.
Instead, Gibbons (2002) notes that the domains of listening and speaking
are as important as reading and writing, and they must be planned for in
order to happen effectively in the classroom.
Specifically, it is helpful for educators to connect speaking to
writing and listening to reading, as each of these two pairs involve
similar processes. Speaking and writing are focused on output, while
listening and reading are about input and comprehension. If we allow
ELLs to talk about their writing before they complete the writing
itself, it will often be more detailed and coherent. In this way it
becomes clear how foundational literacy is to oral language development.
Similarly, when we connect listening and reading as active
processes, greater comprehension can be elicited. In this way structured
and frequent academic oral language development techniques can be
embedded into teachers' daily instructional practice. Once teachers
experience the silence and therefore invisibility of their ELL as they
shadow a student, they will begin to see the negative results of
allowing their ELLs to remain quietly passive in a classroom setting.
How to Shadow an ELL
Shadowing is the process of following a student over several hours
(at least two hours is recommended) and monitoring both their academic
oral language and listening practices. Doing this allows teachers,
administrators, and community members to become sensitive to the
academic oral language development needs of ELLs and begin to change
instructional practices by embedding more "academic talk" into
their instructional design.
Such shadowing projects have been conducted in districts, county
offices of education, and colleges across California, including the Los
Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), Hayward Unified School
District, Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District, and Lucia Mar
Unified School District; Kern, Santa Barbara, Stanislaus, and San Luis
Obispo County Offices of Education; as well as Whittier College
(Whittier, California), Biola University (La Mirada, California), and
Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, California). Through these
projects educators and pre-service teachers gain a glimpse into a day in
the life of ELLs in their school settings.
Participants are first trained using a protocol form (see Figures 1
and 2) with which they monitor the domains of listening and speaking at
five-minute intervals throughout a two-hour time period. It is important
to note that participants are not ready to formally shadow ELLs until
they have studied both the elements of "academic talk" in the
classroom as well as the different forms of listening that they will
At the university level, students do not learn to shadow an ELL
until mid-way through the course, by which point they have amply studied
academic speaking and listening. In a district and county office
setting, an entire day of training occurs around the academic oral
language and active listening needs of ELLs before participants ever
shadow an ELL in a school setting--this is typically done on Day 2 of
professional development training.
Following the protocol, participants identify who the primary
speaker is-whether it is the student or the teacher-and track that
primary speaker and who is being spoken to at five-minute intervals. In
addition, the type(s) of listening involved in the interaction are also
monitored, for example whether one-way or two-way listening is taking
place. One-way listening is an interaction in which students are taking
in information, such as during a lecture. Typically, in one-way
listening, there is no room for clarification or questions. In contrast,
two-way listening allows for clarification to be made, since the
interaction is dialogue-based. That is, the interaction is considered a
Throughout the shadowing project, participants are often astounded
by the fact that the teacher is doing most of the talking, with much of
the interaction being lecture-based, despite the fact that the
teacher's primary duty is to develop the ELLs' language.
Figure 2 shows the shadow study form filled out for two intervals
of a classroom interaction. In the first language exchange at 10:20 we
see that the ELL has just engaged in a song during English/Language Arts
time. Therefore, "academic talk" has been coded as a 4,
because the primary speaker is the student singing with the entire
class. Singing has been noted in the two-way listening exchange as the
student is interacting in talk as well and not merely listening as he
sings. Under the comments section, the observer has written down any
anecdotal notes important to the interaction. Here, specifically, the
observer has noted that the student is attentive and nods that he is
ready to sing.
During the 10:25 exchange, the student engages in an instructional
read aloud. Here, the exchange has been coded 2 under academic one-way
listening because the student is taking in information and not being
asked to respond. Academic speaking has also been coded 2 because the
teacher is the only one doing the talking while she reads the book aloud
to the whole class. Students continue to code interactions this way
every five minutes for two to four hours.
The shadowing project allows teachers to begin to find and
recognize patterns regarding who is doing most of the speaking in
classrooms, and what kinds of listening ELLs are often asked to
undertake. Students soon begin to notice that the primary speaker in
classrooms is often the teacher, as indicated in the second box under
primary speaker (and numbers 5-7) in Figure 2. Similarly students find
that the listening interactions are often one-way, or in lecture mode,
with little room for questions or clarification on the part of the ELL.
In this manner the shadowing project illuminates for teachers the
absence of opportunities for academic oral language practice in the
classroom. Through this process educators are able to reflect on their
own instructional practices and how such practices may positively or
negatively impact student achievement. For example, one teacher in
LAUSD's District 6 stated, "The person talking most is the
person who is learning most.... And I'm doing most of the talking
in my class!" This process reveals the urgency for changing
instructional practice across levels as it often reveals ineffective
Next Steps After Shadowing
After the shadowing experience it is imperative that steps then be
taken at the classroom, school, and district levels. At the district and
school levels, teachers must be given opportunities for focused
professional development about how to create more academic oral language
development in their classrooms. At the teacher education level,
professors must both model effective academic oral language engagement
and demonstrate how to embed such practices in pre-service
teachers' instructional design. For example, at all levels, the
most basic yet powerful technique for academic oral language development
is a method called Think-Pair-Share.
With the Think-Pair-Share method, teachers who have students with
early levels of proficiency can utilize academic oral language
development stems, whereby the first part of a sentence is provided as a
frame, such as "I heard my partner say ..." or "The
evidence from the text demonstrated that the character ...."
Students can then be taught how to effectively formulate their responses
when using the Think-Pair-Share technique, and teachers can be
purposeful in the kinds of questions that are posed.
To do this teachers can enact a fishbowl practice in which two
students are in the front of the classroom and model a conversation for
everyone. In this way the two students model each part of effective
Think-Pair-Share behaviors, such as thinking about their responses first
and finding evidence from the text to substantiate their thoughts
(think). The two students can then model a dialogue (share) whereby they
build off each other's responses, demonstrating that the dialogue
should be a two-way response which also assists students in the domains
of listening and speaking.
It is also important to note that the kinds of questions that are
posed should elicit elaborate language and not just one-word responses.
Teachers should take the time to develop open-ended questions, with
multiple entryways into the conversation, and allow students to have
extended conversations. For example, "What were the characters
motivations and why?, instead of "Was the character's
motivation problematic?" The first question allows for more
extended talk, as well as higher-order thinking, whereas the second
question can be answered using only a yes or no response.
After teachers begin to embed Think-Pair-Share into their daily
practice, they can try more sophisticated academic oral language
development structures such as Reciprocal Teaching or Literature
Circles. These two group techniques structure the academic oral language
development process so that each student has a role and accountable for
academic talk in a classroom setting.
Reciprocal Teaching also allows students to become proficient in
four of the good readers habits. These include summarizing, questioning,
prediciting, and connecting. In a classroom setting each student can
take on one of the roles related to good reading habits, and then have a
deeper conversation around a piece of text from those four good reader
For example, one student will write down the three most important
ideas from a text as the Summarizer, and another student the three most
important questions from that same text as the Questioner. It is
important to note that students, especially ELLs, will oftentimes need
more time, practice, and scaffolding with a new skill, and must be
explicitly trained in how to have such academic conversations. Fishbowl
modeling, again, is advised before ever sending students to independent
practice with Reciprocal Teaching.
Similarly, it is important for the teacher to directly model how to
complete each Reciprocal Teaching role before students independently
engage in each task. Each role should then be rotated with each new text
or conversation, and teachers must monitor the language itself by
rotating around the room to listen in on conversations.
In this way, these two techniques--Think-Pair-Share and Reciprocal
Teaching--become ways for teachers to do their part to increase academic
oral language development systemically, which will also raise English
skills and apprentice ELLs into academic language expectations. Teachers
can then continue to strategize and commit to other ways in which they
can increase academic oral language development practice, the foundation
of literacy and access for ELLs, into their every day practice.
August, D. (2002). Presentation to Los Angeles Unified School
District, District 6, Commerce, CA.
Gibbons, P. (2002). Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning:
Teaching Second Language Learners in the mainstream classroom.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Kinsella, K. (2007). Academic language development presentation for
Mountain View School District, El Monte, CA.
Soto-Hinman, I., & Hetzel, J. (2009). The literacy gaps:
Building bridges for ELLs and SELs. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Ivannia Soto-Hinman is a professor in the Department of Education
at Whittier College, Whittier, California.
Completed Shadowing Form
ELL Student Shadow Study Observation Form
Student First Name:______________ Grade:_______ ELD Level:_______
Time Specific Student Academic Academic
Activity/Location Speaking Listening
of Student 1-Way 2-Way
10:20 "Never Give Up" English 4 singing
language arts song.
Summing up--"make a
long story short"
10:25 Instructional Read aloud 2 2
of Miss Rumphius
Time No Not Comments
(reading or (student if
writing silently) off task)
10:20 Preparation for
lesson B, paying
Head nodding to
Primary Speaker Mostly to Whom? Primary Speaker Mostly to Whom?
Your Student 1. Student Teacher 5. Student
2. Teacher 6. Small Group
3. Small Group 7. Whole Class
4. Whole Class
Primary Listener Listening Mostly to Whom?
Your Student 1. Student
3. Small Group
4. Whole Class