ESL Speaking Activities: Target Talk

Target Talk in my classroom has completely transformed introducing learning objectives in my classroom. A learning objective tells what the student will be doing in class. Before students would simply say the target, and we would move on. Now when the students are talking about learning objectives, they actually dive into what the learning objective means. We often make connections and predictions to events in the world. Below are directions on how you can introduce Target Talk into your classrooms.

 1.  Post the learning objective in kid friendly language. This is really important because you want the learning objectives to be accessible to the students. This also helps the students access how well they are doing with the learning target.  Look at the photo below for an example.

2.   Have a student read the learning objective aloud to the class.

3.   Pose a question to the class about the learning objective. For example, in the photo below I asked the groups to discuss what does the word interpret mean in the language objective.

One of the struggles for my higher ELL students is speaking in complex sentences. I provide the students with complex sentence frames to encourage them to use them in their conversations. Once I see they are using them, I reward them with Speaking Bucks The students then cash those Speaking Bucks in for cool prizes and rewards. 

4. Have the students turn and talk to their group. During this time, I walk around and clear up any misconceptions about the topic. This a great time to perform a formative assessment on the students.

5. Using our emoji rating chart, students will then rate themselves on the learning target.

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I now have an ESL Student Data Binder that you can use with your ELLs! Click here to view a preview of the ESL Student Data Binder.

6. Return to the learning targets at the middle and the end of the lesson.The students love to see how the have progressed throughout the lesson. I then have them discuss their progress and rate themselves again in their data binder.

Since doing this in our classroom there has been a complete turnaround with engagement. Thank you for stopping by!