Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning

The article, “Speaking and Listening in content area learning” is very interesting for teachers or future teachers to read. This article tells many different ways to help students in your classroom with not only speaking comprehension but also listening comprehension which is just as important to me. Throughout this text I found many things that I agree with. One being the statement that read, “Children can listen to and talk about much more complex ideas than they can read (and probably write) about (page 64). This statement is very true in our society because it is so much easier to just orally communicate rather than reading/writing. This articles says that access to complex ideas requires oral, rather than written, input which I haven’t really put too much thought into. Through oral communication students should interact and converse with more people than just their friend groups. Students should have views expanded to see other people’s thoughts and opinions, but also allow others to hear their own thoughts and opinions clearly.

When reading through the evidence based speaking and listening instructional routines I found that they have a lesson where the teacher will read the students a story and then follow up with questions. I love this technique because for 1. I think it just simply works, and 2. I use this technique with Barrett, a little boy that I tutor now and it seems to help him a lot. Through this process he gets so drawn into the story that he is able to answer any question that I may have to follow up with. Another technique I read about is when you have the student read, stop, and communicate what is happening, what they think will happen, etc. I think this technique is genius because it helps the student dig deep and not only think but express creativity. Also through this technique, the teacher is able to make sure that the student is on track and paying attention to what he or she is reading.

This article went on to talk about the use of technology in classrooms. Technology in the classroom, to me, is very important these days. Everywhere we turn there is, and probably always will be, technology. By knowing this, I think that we need to insure that our students know how to work with and operate technology since it plays such a big role in the real world. Having said that, I also believe that there is a fine line between teaching how to use technology and just simply abusing technology. To make sure your students don’t completely rely on the use of technology it is the teacher’s responsibility to show their students ways to get things done without technology incase there is a situation that they get into where they do not have access to technology. If we allow our students to rely completely on technology I think that it is cheating them by cutting off a part of the brain that could be broadened tremendously.