Oral Communication: Promoting Effective Public Speaking

In today's digital age, there is a tendency to focus on electronic communication as we use platforms such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, emails, and many other forms of electronic communication to share our information, thoughts, and ideas. While it is certainly important for our students to learn how to communicate effectively using a variety of communication technology, the critical skill of oral communication must not fall by the wayside.

As the Ontario Language Curriculum discusses, oral communication skills are "fundamental to the development of literacy and essential for thinking and learning" as they allow student to communicate information, understand concepts and ideas, and express and clarify their thoughts, feelings, and opinions (p. 9). Our students need to learn how to effectively communicate their information, thoughts, and ideas through speech. This blog will consider how we can help our students in the junior and intermediate grades to understand how to communicate effectively through public speaking with a particular focus on how they can use their voices and their bodies to convey meaning as they speak.


The Importance of Public Speaking 

In his article Why We Still Need Public Speaking, Jordan Catapano emphasizes how the development of public speaking skills still remains very relevant to the daily lives of our students. While not every student may pursue a job or a hobby that requires them to give a speech in front of a mass audience, every student will have opportunities where they will want to speak comfortably and confidently in front of others whether that be their friends and family members or their boss and co-workers. By understanding the different aspects of public speaking such as eye contact, tone, volume, speed, inflection, and gestures, "students will become more powerful communicators in all aspects of live communication."

Our Voices as Toolboxes

In his TED Talk entitled "How to speak so that people will want to listen", Julian Treasure describes our voices as a toolbox that is filled with different tools which we can use to capture the interest of our audience and to convey meaning. Four of the tools he discusses are prosody, pace, pitch, and volume. For example, we can slow down the pace of our speech and strategically insert silent pauses in order to emphasize certain points. With regards to volume, we can cause our audience to listen more carefully if we vary our volume and strategically use soft and loud speech to emphasize key points or convey our emotions.

TED. (2014, June 27) "How to speak so that people will want to listen."
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIho2S0ZahI

One way to help my students understand the strategies of prosody, pace, pitch, and volume in public speaking would be to model these strategies so that my students could see and experience the powerful effect that these speaking strategies have on an audience. I could recount a short story of an exciting event that recently happened at the school. The first time I told the story, I would speak in a monotone voice and would use the same pitch, pace, and volume throughout the story. Each successive time I told the story, I would vary one feature of my voice. The final time I told the story, all of the voice strategies would be incorporated. Afterwards, we could discuss as a group how much more meaningful and interesting the story was for the students when I used the different tools in my vocal toolkit.

Our Bodies as Instruments 

It is also important for students to understand how their bodies act as instruments in conveying messages when they engage in public speaking. In order to emphasize this point to my students, I could show them the infographic created by Rebekah Radice which offers ten body language tips for confident, effective, and meaningful communication.

In order to make this concept of body language more concrete for my students, I would develop stations where students could focus on practicing one or two of the body language tips in the infographic. For example, one station would focus on maintaining eye contact with the audience while another station would focus on using gestures to engage the audience and add emphasis to key points in the message.


Connections to the Ontario Curriculum 

These resources and activities which focus on how to use our voices and bodies when we communicate orally correspond well to the Ontario Language Curriculum. The second overall expectation of the Oral Communication strand is for students to "use speaking skills and strategies appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes" (p. 9). The body language and vocal strategies that students learn and practice will help students to understand how to keep their audience engaged and how to communicate their thoughts, ideas, and messages with confidence and clarity.

Writing: Promoting Effective Revising and Editing

Writing is a powerful process for students as it encourages them to clarify their thinking and to organize and express their thoughts and feelings. A key stage of effective writing is revising and editing in order to ensure that the text’s message is clear and polished. During my experiences as a volunteer in various elementary school classrooms, I have noticed that it is common for students to struggle with editing and revising their work. This blog post will consider different strategies and resources for helping students to become effective revisers and editors of their writing. While revising and editing are important skills for all students, the strategies in this blog post are particularly beneficial for students in Grades 4-8.


Understanding the Difference between Revising and Editing

Teachers Pay Teachers.

Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2f1s4zt.

In 4 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Revise, Rebecca Alber discusses the importance of “honouring the revision stage.” Teachers will often combine revising and editing which can confuse students and create a misconception that revising and editing are the same thing or that they only need to edit their work. As teachers, we need to help our students to understand that revising and editing are two different processes that are both critical in the effective writing process.

A helpful way for students to understand the difference between revising and editing is to use the short and catchy acronyms ARMS (for revising) and CUPS (for editing) as outlined in the anchor chart on the right from Teachers Pay Teachers. Students who look at the poster can see how revising involves making changes to the text in order to improve its meaning such as by expanding on an idea or substituting bland words for more rich and descriptive words. As the chart demonstrates, editing involves reviewing the text to correct any surface errors such as capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. This chart, therefore, would be helpful for my students as it provides them with a reference of what the different aspects of revising and editing are and what they need to look for when they are in these stages of the writing process.


Strategies for Revising

Revision Stations 
In their blog post 5 Peer Conferencing Strategies That Actually Work, We Are Teachers discuss the idea of revising stations where each station focuses on a different aspect of the revising process. For example, I could set up five revision stations in my class: Word Choice, Ideas and Content, Organization, Sentence Fluency, and Voice. Each station would have a card that offered the students prompts to guide them as they revised their work. For example, a prompt at the Sentence Fluency station might be: Did you use transition words to start your sentences? This focus on one aspect of revising at each station helps students to feel less overwhelmed and encourages them to practice methodically and thoroughly revising their text.

We Are Teachers.

Image retrieved from http://bit.ly/2ei3JpN.

Neon Revision 
Another strategy that We Are Teachers suggests to make revising more meaningful and engaging for students is neon revision. In neon revision, students use different coloured highlighters to focus on different aspects of the text. For example, my students could use blue to highlight all the verbs in their text to see whether they have used active, precise verbs. They could then use pink to highlight all the adjectives in their text to see whether they have used rich, descriptive adjectives.


Strategies for Editing

Checklists
In order to help my students become effective editors, I can provide them with a checklist to guide them as they edit their text. Checklists can make the process of editing seem less overwhelming for students as they break down the overall process of editing into more specific categories and manageable steps. The child is able to work through the editing process in a systematic way as they cross off each aspect of the editing process.

The Editing Checklist for Self- and Peer-Editing from ReadWriteThink is particularly helpful for students in two ways. First, it ensures that the student also has a peer edit their work. This peer might catch mistakes that the author did not notice during their self-edit and can provide the author with helpful comments and constructive feedback. Second, by personalizing the editing statements for the self-edit section, it encourages students to develop a sense of ownership and responsibility for their work.


Connections to the Ontario Curriculum

Helping students to become effective revisers and editors corresponds well to the Ontario Language Curriculum as revising and editing are two stages in the recursive writing process outlined in the curriculum. The second overall expectation of the Writing strand is to “draft and revise their writing, using a variety of informational, literary, and graphic forms and stylistic elements appropriate for the purpose and audience.” The third overall expectation is to “use editing, proofreading, and publishing skills and strategies, and knowledge of language conventions, to correct errors, refine expression, and present their work effectively.” By teaching my students how to revise and edit their work, I can empower them to become effective writers who purposefully and meaningfully communicate their thoughts.