O is for Opportunities

This is the second of five in the series Giving students VOICE.

The phrase “express yourself” might conjure up memories of the non-Biblical Madonna for those of a certain age.  Or it could just sound artsy-fartsy* to you.  In the context of school, we have limited subjects to which “express yourself” applies.  Self-expression during a chemistry class might not be the best idea.  Maybe we were given the “write your own conclusion” option for a history class, but I’m sure a fingerful of us were excited to express ourselves about things like the economic factors leading up to the Great Depression.   I definitely didn’t care about, nor can I remember, any self-expression in the pile of literary analysis papers I did in college.  My great repression, as it were.

In the acronym VOICE, our V stands for Volume, which means giving students plenty of monitored output. Our O stands for opportunities.  Naturally this is tied to volume.  Providing speaking opportunities requires a significant amount of time allotted for meaningful output.  If the volume isn’t there, the opportunities for expression won’t be there.   Self-expression isn’t as pushy-mushy** as it seems, though.  Expression here is simply providing the training framework for language learners to connect speaking to their lives and their classmates’ lives.  Kinda like life.  

Having students opine on the topic from the prescribed book or worksheet is a de facto endorsement of a one-size-fits-all approach.  Unfortunately, that approach does actually function in almost every other school subject because there is little to no urgency for the captive audience to learn the material for application to their lives.  Those standard subjects with units required to be covered are rarely visited again by the indifferent student trying to check the class-passing box.  But for learning to speak a language that you need to learn?  Nope. There is urgency.

As a student practicing a new language, would you rather answer the prescribed question from the book, or would you rather negotiate meaning and accuracy with a partner?  The wonderful by-product of functional training is that you’re opening up a possibility for students to connect with their fellow humans. And as a language trainer planning thoughtfully-sequenced questions, you are building your students’ world.

The other key opportunity you are granting is the opportunity for errors.  I frequently remind my classes that mistakes are good because we need to make mistakes to improve.  If students feel pressure that they can’t make mistakes, especially if they are given limited opportunities to speak and write in class, it’s a double whammy.  And if the teacher tells them it’s okay to make mistakes but the learners are not getting sufficient opportunities, to quote 80s philoso-rocker Rick Springfield, “the point is probably moot.”  If learners don’t feel comfortable making errors in class, where is the correction going to happen?