A Lack of Classroom Talk

I'm currently in a kindergarten placement, and I suspect that many of my students speak Spanish, Spanglish, or African American English Vernacular as at least one of their available speech varieties. I haven't confirmed this because there was a substitute teacher in the classroom during my first observation and . . . the students didn't talk. I didn't see any real discussions or conversations, and most of the speech that I did see was repetition, choral response, or singing. While these activities have their place - choral response, for instance, can be implemented to avoid some of the pitfalls of recitation, such as that a teacher can't tell if her whole class understands something or that students choose to tune out - it doesn't provide a rich environment for ELLs to learn English or for young children to develop their language skills. It certainly doesn't promote critical literacy or a classroom community.

Of course, I expect to see a different environment next week when the teacher returns. One of the problems with the class I observed was that the students weren't really asked questions that would encourage more than one-word answers. Obviously, kindergartners are still learning conversation/discussion skills, and they need scaffolding to do any kind of discussion work.

One factor I noticed that I expect could help the classroom teacher scaffold is that from her brief visit to the classroom to get a student for a literacy assessment, she speaks Spanish. My guess is that her fluency is high, but I know that she knows at least enough to give classroom instructions in Spanish. Because directions can be the linguistically most complex part of an activity, this could considerably reduce student anxiety and increase students' ability to participate in projects.