Nancy Boyles, Cornerstone Literacy Fellow
With assistance and support from: Barbara Chock, principal Johanna Garrison, coach Nicole Brown, coach Laurian Kehoe, staff developer

It was a chilly two degrees above zero in New Haven, CT when I arrived at Bishop Woods School on a Wednesday in late January. The coaches, Johanna (Jo) Garrison and Nicole Brown, were already up to their ears in Cornerstone assessments, so the timing wasn't perfect. However, we didn't want to miss this opportunity to focus on an area of need that we'd long regarded as essential to children's literacy development-but had never addressed directly: oral language teaching and learning.

I had Cornerstone's Best Practices in Oral Language Teaching and Learning in hand, and I had an idea. We'd considered on several occasions the possibility of using our Cornerstone work at Bishop Woods as a means of engaging in some classroom action research. As coaches, Nicole and Jo do a fine job at their school of moving professional development through its various phases, gradually releasing responsibility to teachers. The notion of beginning our exploration of oral language with actual "research" would take that professional learning to a new level. We would begin with a research question, check out the related literature, determine a plan for collecting our data, examine that data in a systematic manner, and then consider the implications of our findings and next steps.

Getting Started with the Research

"Shall we give it a try?" I asked. The coaches consented. (For the moment I omitted the small detail that due to the constraints of my schedule, they'd need to complete most of this work within the next 48 hours.) As a result, we kept our study intentionally simple and direct.

We already had a place to begin-the Oral Language Observation Instrument newly developed by Ellin Keene. We looked at the teaching and learning behaviors included there and formed our essential question: To what degree are teachers and students presently engaging in practices that enhance students' oral language development? We hypothesized that we might find more explicit attention to oral language in the early primary grades and that oral language practices might look different at different grade levels. We also wondered if there could be other teaching and learning behaviors we might look for that were not already specified on the observation instrument.

I had lugged two bagsful of resources with me that morning that I hoped would answer that last question. The results of this literature search were surprising-in an unfortunate sort of way. We skimmed tables of contents and indexes in books that focused on developmental reading in the elementary grades, books about struggling readers, books written from a special education perspective, even books about preschool literacy. What we discovered was that attention to oral language is conspicuously missing from many of the sources where you'd expect to find it. There is lip-service to the topic: Oral language is important to students' literacy development. There's definitely some mention of its role in phonemic awareness. But beyond this cursory coverage, we found only a few paragraphs of useful information. We speculated that perhaps the reason that oral language doesn't command a great deal of attention in many classrooms is that it is incredibly under-represented in the professional literature.

We didn't have much to add to the observation instrument, but as we examined it more closely, we realized that we didn't always agree on the intent of each of the seven teaching and seven learning criteria. We spent the next couple of hours making sure that these criteria were clear to us and that we could make them clear to the other teachers who would be part of this study. We even added a few exemplars of our own based on familiar curriculum content in this district.

Gathering our Evidence

How would we collect our data? When we came to this part of the study design we stared blankly at each other for a few minutes. Getting teachers to be reflective about instructional practices is never an easy task. One of the coaches suggested that perhaps a simple renaming of the instrument might be a first step in clarifying this focus on reflection. Hence, we would provide teachers with a document for Reflecting on Oral Language Teaching and Learning instead of an Oral Language Observation Instrument.

After playing around with a couple of strategies for doing this "reflecting" we hit upon the idea of establishing pairs of critical friends at each grade level, K-3. The coaches would review the oral language teaching and learning criteria and exemplars with teachers who agreed to participate. Each teacher would be instructed to visit her partner-teacher's classroom during one lesson of 20-30 minutes to reflect on the kinds of oral language that occurred. (They would note what they saw in the appropriate little box on the Reflecting sheet.) Teachers were told that the lesson should represent "business as usual;" this could be a literacy lesson-or a lesson in any content area. It should not be a lesson that targeted oral language, per se. By the time we finalized our data collection strategy, the principal and staff developer had joined us, and pledged their support.

"Did I mention you have two days to select your teacher-sample and get this work done?" I convinced everyone this was actually doable-precluding any more snow cancellations. The principal even volunteered to find coverage for participating teachers so we could all sit together on the following Monday to share and analyze our data.

Sharing the data

Fast forward to Monday (and the rapid approach of yet one more snow storm). I hadn't received any frantic phone calls or e-mail messages over the weekend-a positive sign, I thought. Still, I was surprised to find 12 teachers and the principal sitting around a table in the school library when I arrived, all clutching their completed reflection forms, and looking downright scholarly.

Although this "critical friend" teacher-pairing had come about more by accident than design, it worked well for several reasons: It took the coaches out of the hot-seat, from the unintended, but often perceived role of "expert." Concurrently, it empowered a dozen teachers and sent the message that their voices were valued in this important work.

"I'm so impressed," I told them. I could tell that everyone had a lot to say and wanted to make the most of the 90 minutes we had to sort out our findings. Each teacher described the lesson she had seen, noting specific evidence of many of the oral language teaching and learning behaviors. There were a lot of smiles as anecdotes were shared of particular verbal exchanges between teachers and students. "Benjamin said all that?" noted one of the kindergarten teachers. "I remember when he first came to this school; he only knew two words of English."

It was a time for celebration as well as discovery. Our true mission, however, was to synthesize what we had discovered. Did we see trends? What was common across classrooms? And most importantly, how could these findings inform oral language teaching and learning? Following are a few of the findings that emerged as we sifted through our data:

What We Found

• Every teacher took the time to redefine hard words in the context of oral discussion or reading aloud. This seemed to be evident at all grade levels and often occurred many times within a single lesson.
• Some, but not all, teachers had charts or word walls in their classrooms with titles like "Delicious Words" or "Blooming Words" and used these spaces to record the new and interesting vocabulary students could use in speech and print.
• Many teachers were observed modeling the thought process through thinking aloud. Teachers also encouraged students to think aloud about their own thought process: ("How did your visual image help you to understand this character better?")
• Students were observed mimicking their teacher's "respectful" language. As one child settled himself into the author's chair, he quietly stated, "I'm waiting for Marquel to be a good listener." Another little girl approached her teacher after a task had been assigned: "I need a better understanding of this assignment."
• Several teachers observed their teacher-partner doing crafting lessons around the metacognitive strategies and discovered that this was fertile ground for the inclusion of many oral language best-teaching practices as well as opportunities for productive kid-talk. This was a stark contrast to lessons in the math area where the district-mandated program is highly prescriptive in nature. Teachers' absolute focus on "getting through the lesson" all but eliminated most opportunities for extended talk by either teacher or students.
• Teachers who made a conscious effort to extend students' thinking by asking "What else can you tell me" after a perfunctory one-word response were often surprised by a child's depth of knowledge. One little first grader who initially responded that the pirate had a "thing" on his head, with prompting, changed his response to, "The pirate is wearing a bandanna."
• Teachers who consciously provided wait time were often rewarded by the responses they eventually got from students. A third grader with very limited English who was reluctant to answer a question initially, was allowed a little more thought time to prepare his response, and produced a wonderfully coherent sentence about a text to text connection.
• Some teachers provided sentence stems or appealed to other students to provide stems to "jump start" speakers who appeared to have an idea to share, but seemed unable (or unwilling) to begin to verbalize that thought. (In a kindergarten class: "Can someone help Loretta start her answer about today's weather?)

What We Didn't Find

• Beyond the opportunity for wait-time, giving students the chance to practice in their mind what they would say out loud, teachers did not report seeing much going on in classrooms regarding the rehearsal of oral language. They seemed unsure about how this kind of "rehearsal" could look at various grade levels. They wondered what counts as "rehearsal?"
• Several teachers noted that students' oral language patterns reflected awareness of different audiences, but they wondered how they could bring students' language patterns in less formal situations (the cafeteria and recess) more in line with the (respectful) patterns present in the classroom.
• Teachers reported that although students used basic language structures to communicate ideas satisfactorily, they wondered how they might increase the richness of students' talk to include more sentences of varying lengths and complexity, including different sentence beginnings.

Accounting for What Teachers Saw

As I listened to what these teacher-researchers had to say (and scribbled notes furiously, trying not to miss anything), I wanted them to reach beneath the surface to try to account for what was present and not present in the lessons they witnessed. "How do you explain all this?" I asked. "Why do you think some oral language teaching and learning behaviors are evident in so many classrooms, and a few other traits are generally absent?"

There was immediate consensus among teachers that the factor most responsible for classroom talk is a learning environment where students feel free to take risks. When children feel that their voices are valued, they want their voices to be heard.

Two perfect examples of this came from the kindergarten teachers. One little boy, new to this country, with almost no English language skills stood before his class with the story he had written (drawn), and "read" the entire thing aloud-in Turkish!

Another little kindergartener last year was a selective mute. Throughout his preschool years he had remained silent to everyone but his parents. At the beginning of the year not only did he refuse to speak, he wouldn't even make eye contact. One day his teacher overlooked him as she was distributing stickers-which may have been the best oversight of her career. "You forgot my sticker," he whispered. The rest is history. He looped with his teacher to first grade, and as the story goes, now needs occasional reminders about keeping quiet! He is also quite a good reader.

It appears that as we increase kids' competence, we also increase their confidence, including the confidence to use their voice. It appears that when the classroom environment is caring and nurturing a lot of oral language just happens. Even without much direction about how to infuse oral language teaching and learning into the curriculum, good teachers of literacy almost instinctively support students' oral language development. This came as a welcome insight to teachers at Bishop Woods who have typically given themselves low grades on oral language features on the Cornerstone Asset Map. They are doing more than they thought they were doing.

Thinking about our Needs

Hold the applause! While there was much evidence of incidental language teaching and learning, teachers also saw that their focus on oral language, particularly beyond the kindergarten level could be more intentional. They wondered:

• What can we do to provide for more oral language rehearsal? How could we use this rehearsal as a link between speaking and writing? How could we use rehearsal as a means of facilitating not only language work, but language play?
• What can we do to advance the social dimension of oral language? Specifically, how can we use the conversations in our classrooms as a vehicle for teaching children about the interactive and collaborative skills of good listeners and good speakers?
• What can we do to increase the sophistication of students' oral language and speech patterns? What would authentic classroom experiences look like that targeted more precise, varied, and sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structure..
• What can we do to enlist parents' support in our quest to enhance students' oral language? Are there specific ways we can help parents and get parents to help us?

Next Steps

Our little study at this school, invented and implemented in a matter of days, gave us enough information to keep professional development going at full throttle for a many months (years?). Perhaps more importantly, it had brought us to this place in a way that we often seek but too seldom achieve: through true collaboration among adult learners in a professional learning community.

The teachers at this school, with the help of their coaches, will choose just one of the needs identified above as a launching point for a more intentional focus on oral language. And when they make that choice, I anticipate that they will be more invested in its outcome than they otherwise might have been. We will see how that energy manifests itself in classroom practices that celebrate the promise of oral language as an integral component in students' literacy development.