Oral Strategies

1. Story Reenactment
ELPS Standard: 74.4 3C - speak using a variety of grammatical structures, sentence
lengths, sentence types, and connecting words with increasing accuracy and ease as more
English is acquired
Description: The strategy of story reenactment helps students increase their expressive
oral language by having them first read a story or have the teacher read it, and then
having them retell it themselves in order, while listing props they would need to act it out.
They can then make the props in cooperative groups, and use the props to retell and
reenact the story (Herrell, & Jordan, 2012). This strategy could be used in all content
areas with some creativity, but especially in social studies, science, and language arts
class. I would use it to reenact historical events such as the Boston Tea Party in social
studies, the metamorphosis of a butterfly in science, and The Three Little Pigs in
language arts. This strategy could even be used in math to reenact a word problem.
Rationale Story Reenactment helps ELL students develop oral language and increase
their academic language, vocabulary, sentence length, sentence types, and grammatical
structures all while having fun. This strategy would be a mix of innatist and interactionist
theory since speaking would be unstructured and come naturally as they reenact the story.
Story reenactment would be a strategy that would probably work best for intermediate to
advanced ELL learners.
2. Dictogolos
ELPS Standard: 74.4 2C learn new language structures, expressions, and basic and
academic vocabulary heard during classroom instruction and interactions

Description The strategy of dictogolos is a great listening and learning language

strategy. The teacher chooses a text and reads aloud, while telling the class to listen
carefully. The teacher then reads the text two more times. After that, the students are
instructed to write down any phrases and key words that they heard. Then, students are
paired up to recreate the text as close as possible to the original. Once the pairs are
finished, create a group of four and have them work together to get the text as close as
possible to the original text read by the teacher. Last, have one of the group members read
the recreated text and have the class judge on how closely it resembles the original
(Herrell, & Jordan, 2012). I would use this strategy to develop oral language skills in
every single content class. I would read texts in social studies, science, language arts, and
math. I would use this strategy to develop academic and social language through fiction,
non-fiction, and academic texts.
Rationale This strategy aligns closely with the ELPS I selected by having students
develop their listening skills while learning new language structures and vocabulary. This
strategy also has a strong interaction component that exposes students to classroom
interactions. This strategy can be used for any developmental level of language learner.
For the beginning learner, if the student cant write, they could draw pictures. This
strategy seems to be a good example of Krashens input hypothesis. As long as the text
being read is at the students comprehensible input, this strategy gives them the ability to
acquire the language without specifically teaching grammatical structures (Peregoy &
Boyle, 2013).