The Stage, the Coffee Table & the Studio

This is the link to the recording of the The Stage, the Coffee & the Studio: Differentiating Opportunities for and Developing the Oral Skills for Young Learners webinar to refer back to.

Here is a link to the slideshow used during the webinar to refer back to.


If you watch our webinar after the live presentation, please let us know you joined-in with our learning and share some feedback so we can stay connected. 

This website from the creators of the ECRIF Framework, Josh Kurzweil & Mary Scholl, presents the framework we use at I4CL to frame how we  see learners in their process of learning. Reimagined from the student perspective, ECRIF guides how we plan, facilitate, observe, and reflect upon learning experiences.

“The ECRIF framework is a way of looking at how people learn. Rather than prescribing what teachers should or should not do, the aim of this framework is to provide a tool that teachers can use to see student activities and content from the perspective of student learning" (Kurzweil & Scholl, 2007).

This video created by the US Department of State’s American English E-Teacher program offers several guidelines to help you when planning lessons and sequencing activities to scaffold language learning.

This article from Reading Rockets explores the foundational components of oral competency as well as what contextual factors support the development of those components.

This Video from National Geographic Learning’s Young Learner Series lets us peek into the classroom to observe how one teacher uses pictures cards to create a scaffolded sequence of meaningful productive activities.

This handout from the U.S. Department of Education presents a systematic approach to transforming “thin” conversations typical of learners developing a language into “thick” conversations that provide richer input and interaction.

This article from Colorín Colorado explores 5 common problems with developing oral skills among English Language Learners, as well as a possible solution to each.

In this video, Joan Kang and George Mason University share some guidelines to help create a classroom environment that is supportive to speaking.

This article from WestEd dives into several misconceptions teachers may carry around supporting speaking fluency, and offers researched backed ideas to approach these challenges in new ways.