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Hurricanes and tornadoes listening activity.

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Say It / Speaking strategies / Oral Language / ESOL teaching strategies / Resources for planning / Planning for my students' needs / ESOL Online / English - ESOL - Literacy Online website - English - ESOL - Literacy Online

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This activity provides motivation for students to try new structures and vocabulary within a small group setting. It enables students to speak from another viewpoint, recall information, identify main points and prepares students for writing. While undertaking the tasks the students are more likely to notice their own language gaps and test their hypothesis and provide/receive feedback.

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How to use 4/3/2

4/3/2 is a useful technique for developing oral fluency. Learners give the same talk to three different learners with decreasing time to do it.

The learners work in pairs. Learner A talks to Learner B and has a time limit of four minutes to do this. B just listens and does not interrupt or question. When the four minutes are up, the teacher says, "Change partners". Learner A then moves to a new Learner B. The teacher says "Begin" and Learner A gives exactly the same talk to the new partner but this time has only three minutes. When the three minutes are up, the teacher says "Stop. Change partners." With a new partner, Learner A now has two minutes to talk. During the three deliveries of the same story, the B learners do not talk and each listens to three different people. When the A learners have given their talk three times, the B learners can now go through the same sequence, this time as speakers.

"Research on this activity shows that the learners' speed of speaking increased during the talks (as measured by the number of words per minute), the hesitations they make decrease (as measured by hesitations per 100 words), and surprisingly their grammatical errors in the repeated parts of the talk decrease and they tend to use several, more complex grammatical constructions in the last of the three talks than they did in the first talk" (Nation, 1989, p. 381).

These features of 4/3/2 develop spoken fluency:

1. The activity involves known vocabulary, grammar, and discourse.

2. The learners have a high chance of performing successfully at a higher than normal speed.

3. There are repeated opportunities to do the same thing.

The first time that learners use this technique they will need to recount something that happened to them. This is because the chronological order of the events will make it easier to recall and repeat because the time sequence provides a clear structure for the talk. Fluency development tasks need to involve language items that are already familiar to the learners, need to involve largely familiar content, and need to include some kind of encouragement to perform faster than usual.

Watch this video to see a year 5-6 social studies class using the 4-3-2 strategy
Teaching and learning sequence examples
Primary level:

Secondary level:

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4/3/2 is a useful technique for developing oral fluency. Learners give the same talk to three different learners with decreasing time to do it. The learners work in pairs. Learner A talks to Learner B and has a time limit of four minutes to do this.