Maximizing student talk time: Another perspective
Jonathon Ryan
A few weeks ago Michael raised the question of how to maximise student talk time (STT) in the second language classroom and laid out some core principles, as well as some techniques for teachers to monitor the amount of STT that they create. Maria followed up last week with some practical activities and this week I'm following up with a couple of additional thoughts.
One approach to maximising STT is to ask which classroom activities could be modified to include more active student participation, but another is to reconsider how much time we currently spend on activities that are non-optimal. If, for example, we can free up an additional 10 minutes in the hour, we make space for additional tasks involving STT.
For instance, in her book of teaching tips, Penny Ur notes that she's seen many teachers spend an inordinate amount of time checking homework, often by calling on a volunteer to read out their answer, correcting them, writing it up, commenting on it and so on, while the rest of the class patiently waits.
“This can take up half the lesson. It's often a waste of time, because the students have already done the assignment, and the repetition can be boring and contribute little to learning” (Ur, 2016, p. 57).
It's not that homework shouldn't be checked—it should—but that there are far more efficient ways to go about it, such as promptly dictating answers and getting students to self-check.
There are many other less-than-optimal uses of classroom time. Scrivener (2012) makes a similar observation about the time wasted by teachers who are in the habit of frequently rearranging classroom seating in ways that prove noisy, disruptive and often chaotic.
My own pet frustration is when teachers wait for latecomers before getting the lesson properly underway, or—when the latecomer arrives halfway through an instruction—starting their whole spiel again. Rather than waste everyone's time, come back to the late arriver afterwards or ask their neighbour to explain.
In attending to these and the many other ways that classroom life is squandered, it's entirely possible that some classes could easily double or triple the time available for STT-promoting tasks.
On the other hand, I would also briefly caution against the type of over-preparedness that results in a classroom that runs like clockwork. On of my colleagues had some fascinating observational data (touched on in Wang & Ryan, 2023), where the students were so well drilled in how the class operated that they could seemingly anticipate each next step in the teacher’s routine. On the one hand, there was an undeniable efficiency in how the students moved from one activity to the next. On the other hand, the class had been stripped bare of spontaneous language. Because students knew what to do, they didn’t need to listen. They didn’t have to ask clarifying questions. They didn’t have to respond to anything off the cuff. They didn’t actually have to say anything other than what they had pre-prepared. And if that sounds dull and soulless, yes, it was. But it was also lacking all of the most authentic uses of language that arise in ordinary classrooms. It’s often in those unplanned moments when a student asks a question or feels the urge to express themselves that some of the most authentic STT occurs and where students are most receptive to finding out how to express a certain idea or perform a certain action. We need to ensure that we allow space for this non-choreographed STT.
One final thought. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but there was also a time when as part of teacher training, teachers would be asked to remain entirely silent during their lesson. The idea was that this helped teacher trainees to develop their practical classroom management skills, and—as far as I know—no one ever advocated running regular classrooms like this. It would obviously be absurd to do so, except as a one-off novelty or to manage a case of laryngitis. But it does raise the question of how best to arrive at a balance between an optimal amount of student and teacher talking time.
Let’s not forget that teacher talk is some of the best language input and listening practice that many students are likely to receive, and the opportunity to interact with the teacher is similarly some of the best speaking practice they get.
References
Scrivener, J. (2012). Classroom management techniques. Cambridge University Press.
Ur, P. (2016). Penny Ur’s 100 teaching tips. Cambridge University Press.
Wang, Y., & Ryan, J. (2023). The complexity of control shift for learner autonomy: A mixed-method case study of Chinese EFL teachers’ practice and cognition. Language Teaching Research, 27(3), 518-543. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820957922