Tech Integration: Speaking and Listening

Literacy changed how humans think. This historical fact plays out in the life of every person who learns to read and write. It is such a miraculous transformation, and one that takes so much educational effort, that we might think of it as a change from worse to better, or that speaking and listening are replaced by literacy. This is not so. The speaker and the listener are always in us, and oral communication is still basic to the human experience.

There is a high cloud of theory about the two cultures of orality and literacy, both as human cultures and within the individual. (See Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, for a start.) There is also a growing cloud of theory about technology, and whether it brings ways of thinking that are more like literacy or orality. Out of these clouds, let me rain down a simple idea:

Students ought to learn to speak and listen well, gaining more insights over the years. Technology can help.

K–2: Cultivate awareness of the word

At this age we want students to become aware of the presence of words in speech. Readers and writers think in words. Participants an oral culture (and children at this are are still mostly oral) do not think of speech as being built out of specific words. When young children speak about a turtle, they are aware of the turtle but rarely aware of the word “turtle.” They may think of a thunderstorm, but shift easily to an earthquake or a car or a superhero. This is the fluid thinking we love in children. For literate speakers, words hold us to a fixed subject. Words are a contract that young children do not sign.

If our students can speak at this age, we have two opportunities. For one, we can capture their speaking to make them aware of words. For another, we can celebrate their speaking and help them become better speakers. Let us look at each in turn:

The teacher should help writing spring from students’ speech. Get the students talking, and record them. Begin with prompts that inspire a lot of talking. With the right prompts, the speech should bubble right out of them. For example, show this image:

Imagine this image shown to a room of first graders. Students will voice the different “actors” in this image, guaranteed. Encourage them to walk to the microphone and record them. On this or a second occasion, play back those recordings and ask students what words they hear: “Fast,” “whee,” “race,” “frog,” “bug,” whatever may arise. The teacher can select the words (“bug,” “go”) that are within students’ range to start writing (“Go bug, go!”). The key is that the words arose out of the students’ speech. Playing back the recordings and emphasizing the words will reinforce this.

Repeat this exercise in different ways. In a perfect world we could do this for every spontaneous bit of talk kids invent:

What can we do with a similar feeling, but less effort? What about recording kids’ spontaneous spoken inventions, then layering them with images and the words we wish to draw out? The key is for students to see their speaking as not only powerful but also full of words — words that can be spelled out, celebrated, and repeated.

Elevate students’ spoken performances. We have tools that will enable students to record their own voices while they draw or talk or respond to images. Take this example:

The students collected objects in groups of seven, then recorded their own voices saying, for example “siete palos” (seven sticks). (This was done in an iPad app called Book Creator, but there are many ways to do this.) Imagine pictures with children’s narration that, for instance, explain how to do something in the classroom, or tell a story, or say why something is important.

The key distinction is we are encouraging orality rather than transitioning to the written word. This is speaking for its own sake. The teacher provides the structure through technology; the students provide the speech.

Grades 3–5: In search of patterns in speech

Students should find language everywhere. Send students with an audio recording device, in search of speech in their community: Jokes from the playground, thoughts of the day from teachers, favorite recipes from family members. Audio recording is easy. Transcribing is hard; it takes coordination in typing and starting and stopping audio. But we can ask students to listen and re-listen to find words or phrases that surprise them, that they want to remember. Find a way to develop these bits of found language into displays

If we can get students past the boundary of feeling self-conscious about their own voices, we can ask them to record their own speaking and write down key phrases.

Send them to archives of speeches, sales pitches, beat poetry. Remembering that this is, or can be, an age of fascination with the extremes of real experience, send them in search of the crazy extremes of the spoken word.

Students should bring speech patterns to life with design. In K-2, we think of using audio recordings to negotiate between speech and the written word. Now we can think about using type to bring out the dynamics of the written word. Let’s see some type in action:

Notice how the timing and movement hew to the spoken word. Although animations like this are difficult to create, simpler versions are not. Let’s isolate one frame:

This is typography attuned to the rhythm and emphasis of speech. Teach students to tune in to the same elements, and make visual art from their own cadences.

Bolster students’ ability to speak to an audience. Very few students are excited about standing empty-handed in front of a class, presenting a state report or book review. But students with materials to show, into which they have put their expertise, become far more comfortable with the process. Simply put, let them make something and, in the process, become experts. Then let them present what they make.

TED Talks are outstanding models. Consider this talk by Tavi Gevinson, and focus on how her slides help her build a dialogue with herself:

She is not just putting lists on the screen. She asks questions, voices her inner thoughts, contradicts herself. Without the visuals, would she be as fluent and conversational as she is?

Think first about students creating slideshows with jumping-off points. Build questions, prompts, and intriguing visuals into the slideshow. Add in visuals that cry out to be explained. Then teach students how to lead discussion with these elements. Finally, give students many rounds of practice this way.

Find new venues for students’ speaking skills. Think of video book reviews. We can establish a kiosk in our library with students’ book reviews available: scan a book, see a video of a student reviewing a book. We can record students explaining school programs and share them with the community. In every case, do not coast on the novelty of recording students. Give them lots of guidance and practice.

Grades 6–8: Speech in multiple layers

The key development of this age is sarcasm: Insincerity with a purpose. The performance of speech becomes a chance to practice a public stance, which may be removed from the private experience. In fact, the distance between the inner cognitive experience and the outward expression measures the amount of charge. A shy, reluctant boy who makes comedy of ridiculously tough talk is both affirming his realistic self and getting a jolt out of the cartoon self.

Sarcasm is a blunt tool. Irony is finer. Irony allows us to experience layers of meaning, including layers that contradict each other. Through irony, students can begin to map the stances and social attitudes that compose the human story. By playing with irony, students rehearse how they take part in these stances and social attitudes.

Students should critically examine the performance of speaking. Let us consider this gloriously outsized character:

Setting aside the content of Roosevelt’s speech, consider only the elements that may strike a young observer: The weirdly formal character of his speech patterns, mixed with the sort of hypermasculine imagery, leaves a vivid impression. Now ask students to listen to the cadence, the sentence length, the inflection. Then ask them to give a speech on a trivial matter in Teddy Roosevelt’s style, and see what happens.

Now consider:

What is happening here? A re-voicing of Donald Trump lets us “see” the features of his speech, his approach, his word choices. We also have a new social register overlaid on Trump’s speaking style. The result is a kind of technologically induced irony. We become aware of incongruent layers of accent, gesture, tone of voice and words.

How can students play with these kinds of re-voicings? The lowest high-tech solution is to play a speech and turn the sound off, letting students perform the voice. Or go the other way and play the audio to a speech while students speak it. More ambitious teachers can find tools that let students record these new layers of audio.

But even without performing, students can dig deeply into the spoken word to study how people speak. Here we begin to explore the classical idea of rhetoric, of refined and practiced speech. For instance, listen to the great physicist Richard Feynman explaining magnets. Listen for these devices: sorites, a string of statements where end of one is subject of next; ploce, repetition of word in more expressive sense for emphasis; and dialogism, rhetorical discussion in form of an imaginary dialogue.

As we follow Feynman’s thoughts, we are guided onward by his combination of warm enthusiasm and steady objection; by the high, emphatic voice with which he make claims and the low, rapid voice with which me makes asides; and by the continuity of his thought, which progresses from a far-flung hypothetical (Aunt Minnie slipping on the ice) by sequence to an eventual answer. These 7 minutes are a master class in conversational reasoning.

Students should practice adopting voices. In this self-conscious age, one of the hardest expectations is that a student should speak in his or her own voice. The internet gives us boundless access to human speech, from every part of the world and every station in society. If we ask students to imitate the different modes of speaking they study, they will naturally absorb the vocabulary and mindset of the speaker. The instinct for comedy and theatrics would serve them well in this case. We also cultivate empathy and understanding for multiple viewpoints.

Grades 9–12: Systematic speech

In the classical tradition, rhetoric sat alongside writing as sophisticated subject. Students did not just speak; they spoke formally, and acquired more forms as they grew older and more skilled. We could use digital media to

Students should broaden their use of the spoken word. Podcasts, and audio technology in general, give us an avenue for restoring the diversity of spoken word to learning. Consider this list of essential podcasts of 2016. We have political analysis, interviews, movie criticism, one-on-one therapy, personal narratives. We move in and out of journalism, art, poetry. We have formal performances, stream of consciousness, dialogue.

Let us set aside, for the moment, the technical issues (which are not so bad). The point is to develop the breadth and depth of students’ speaking performances through digital media.

Think of ways to encourage enlightened responses to the world through speech. A recording of a student speaking her way through a specific memory can have an emotional, direct character that a written essay does not have.

Furthermore, think of a student editing sounds and others’ voices into layers, sequences, storytelling. There is traditional dialogue, consisting of two people speaking back and forth. But then there is dialogue through montage: two or more voices or sounds or music interacting by being edited into a new combination. Listen to, and play, some episodes of Radiolab or This American Life to establish a sense of dialogue through montage; it is a new form of storytelling, and a rich one.

Students should perform critical analysis of spoken language.

We have, suddenly, boundless access to all the world’s language performances. Let us consider two of them:

It would do no good to take down the lyrics of the Disney songs and declare the are actually literate performances. They are meant to be sung and heard, and the rhetorical devices are as much about rhythm and sound as they are about content. And, of course, our excerpts of Appalachian speech, which this Yankee find fascinating and beautiful, are purely oral performances. They also trigger responses in us: Do these people sound uneducated? Is their grammar “wrong”? And how would we transcribe what they say? Would we fix their “incorrect” word usages? (Try an experiment: Turn on the closed captioning on the Appalachian video.)

We have an opportunity to do analysis that was all but impossible before this boundless access. Here are some possibilities:

• Find examples of people of different backgrounds and settings speaking casually, and examine the different registers of speech you find. Attune students to the issue of different registers of spoken language. What does formal English (a speech to shareholders) sound like, compared to a backyard conversation? How do we signify gender in how we speak? How to we signify that we belong to a certain culture, or wish to? Everyone participates in code switching, or altering their way of speaking for different audiences. Studying it in action can develop students’ self-awareness and critical responses.
• How do people persuade in speech? Direct students to study examples of people persuading: politicians, surely; but also actors in commercials; or even people trying to tell a story with some conviction. Direct students’ attention not just to the words but also to the non-verbal communication. Make a note of which words they draw out. Pay attention to filler words: um, like, uh. This is the richness of human communication in action.