Academic Conversations in Classrooms with English Language Learners (EL-115)

Using Academic Conversations to Motivate Students and Foster Engagement

Audience

Any ESL and/or elementary and middle school educators or coaches and their supervisors

Topics

Paired academic conversations, five core communication skills: paraphrase, elaborate, support ideas with examples, build on and/or challenge ideas, and synthesize conversation points. Evaluation of classroom video footage. This is an ESE Extending the Learning Course - ESE Course Number EEC109.

Format

 16 face-to-face hours - plus 9 hours of online work (25 hours total).  Can be scheduled on two and a half Saturdays. Alternatively, the course can be run for shorter sessions. Can be formatted flexibly to meet the needs of a district. 

PDPs

25 PDPs

Credit

Optional 2 graduate credits

Description

Academic conversations motivate students and foster engagement. In this course, teachers in diverse settings will build on students' strengths through paired academic conversations. English language learners especially benefit from this approach because they learn to use language as a tool to share ideas, defend opinions, and make connections with others. Participants will investigate five core communication skills: paraphrase, elaborate, support ideas with examples, build on and/or challenge ideas, and synthesize conversation points. This course will provide practical activities for working on each conversation skill and ideas for using conversations to teach and assess content. The total number of course hours is 25.  15 hours of this course serve as SEI Extension course credits. Note: This course includes all materials, including the Zwiers and Crawford text, Academic Conversations:  Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understanding

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