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/
