In our mathematics classrooms we want our students to have engaging conversations that encourage students to think critically about each other's ideas. When students think critically they must challenge each other's responses and ask for clarification. Being able to participate in scholarly conversation is a skill that needs to be taught; it's even more difficult for English Language Learners (ELLs) who are trying to learn the language and content at the same time. This summer while taking my ELL Part 1 course I learned about the use of talk stems that provide students with sentence starters for initiating academic conversation.A poster like this, hung on your classroom wall can be used as a form of reference for students when they are working in groups. Making reference and modeling some of these sentence stems would be very beneficial in classroom discussion.
Poster taken from: https://mrlhuillier.wordpress.com/
These sentence starters would be very useful in guiding math discussions in class to develop students communication of thinking (metacognition). I have seen the idea of sentence stems used in the Lucy Calkins writing program and appreciate having it connected to mathematics. I also find that student struggle to give critical feedback to their peers and that practice in their ability to communicate, may make this more effective. We have started to add language objectives to our mathematics rubrics and this would also be beneficial for building the students ease with math vocabulary.
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