Our days are filled with chatter. I know mine is. And it begins the moment I open my eyes … all the usual half-awake exchanges as the kids get ready for school and dawdle through breakfast, my words becoming more alert and urgent as I shoo them out the door to catch the school bus. Then it’s the radio host spieling off the hourly news as I drive to my first school, words coming out at a clip. And when I arrive for yard duty, welcoming students and families, their greetings are morning-bright and plentiful. As the day progresses, multiple text-to-speech messages to beloved colleagues usually occur, about an unexpected event, confirming a procedure, or maybe just seeing how they are doing … and in return characters pop up on my screen, gifts of script that are my support and comfort as I navigate my role. And finally, the classroom itself, filled to the brim and bustling with nearly six and half hours of language each day.
Our world and our classrooms can be predominantly verbal linguistic in nature. Life is encoded in language, and as an ESL teacher, I have become acutely aware of the isolation and exhaustion that can occur if a student is just beginning to learn that language. Everything is a challenge, everything takes time. As peers effortlessly receive and toss back messages, multilingual language learners continually try to deduce meaning, search for context, and cross-translate in order to understand and respond.
As I have noted many times in this blog, I know countless teachers who are exceptional at making the language of instruction accessible to MLLs. They use visuals as they speak during lessons, they pre-teach vocabulary before tasks, they provide sentence stems before speaking in groups, they activate prior knowledge in first language … again, I could fill a page with the strategies I have seen.
But sometimes, sometimes there is a time for quiet. Where we remove words and language from the learning task altogether. And in these moments, when I observe MLLs, I see the tense expression slowly ebb from their faces, worry dissolving. Suddenly, everyone is on an even playing field. Suddenly the labour of navigating English gives way to flowing visual creations, construction, movement, silent collaboration.
Here are a few of my favorites …
Sequencing games in which students must line up in a particular order (by birthday month starting at January, for example) but must figure out the order silently, using nonverbal cues to convey information.
Tableaux and interpretive movement, in which students explore character and emotion and story development through motion and physicality. No one speaks. The room is simply filled with still-life scenes, expression, and silent, unified observation.
Math games with pattern blocks, in which one student at a time views a secret shape constructed by the teacher, and then returns to their table group to try to recreate that multicoloured shape from memory with their own set of blocks. As students each take a turn viewing the teacher’s shape, one by one, they return to their group members and help each other adjust and finish the shape accurately. The catch? No talking.
These are just a couple of options, but there are countless ways to engage students in rich learning, in momentary quiet. Just a little bit of time, for the cognitive load to ease. And I suspect it is not only MLLs that benefit from the occasional learning task in which language is removed. The introverted child, who prefers to contemplate before speaking, has ample time to do so during silent drama tableaux. The student with language output challenges, their sharp minds usually frustrated by the inability to pull words out quickly … suddenly their insights and ideas flow unimpeded. And sometimes … sometimes everyone benefits from a little solitude, a slowing of the day’s frenetic pace into soundlessness.
Hoping you and your students, from time to time, find togetherness in this most wonderful kind of quiet.
