My MLs need help passing the WIDA Speaking!

Do your MLS need help with WIDA speaking? Every year when WIDA ACCESS speaking scores come in, your anticipation for raised scores are high, but inevitably, your hopes are dashed. Year after year you notice your students’ scores are not getting any higher. I know I have pulled my hair out in the past because my MLs were having trouble passing the WIDA Speaking Test. Luckily, I came upon some solutions.

I have found ways to help my Multilingual Learners (MLs)  pass this portion of the WIDA ACCESS speaking test. I found myself giving all of my groups the same tips and tricks on how to improve their scores.

Some examples of these tips were:

1. Your teacher does not score your test. The scorers are teachers from all over the country who do not know you. So, they only have this one recording of your voice in which they judge your speaking ability.
2. Nina is a voice actor, so she is a professional speaker. Don’t be too freaked out by Nina.  She is there to help you hear how much and how well you are supposed to speak. You should be matching Nina’s clarity and fluency as well as the amount of words and time she is taking.
3. You should take notes as to what to say, but don’t write a script. Reading from a script sounds unnatural, and the scorers are listening for natural speech patterns.

If you want to offer your students more, check out the video I made called Tips and Tricks to Show Progress on the WIDA ACCESS Speaking Test. It saves you time and your voice from repeating the same tips through all your classes.

Something else I think is very important to prepare my MLs for the WIDA speaking test is to give them a mnemonic device to help them remember what to include in their answers to academic speaking prompts. Now, I want to start by saying I would only use this with Levels 3 and above proficiency levels. The lower proficiencies just need to feel comfortable saying a few sentences. Generally their WIDA speaking scores are accurate. It is in the upper levels when the scores don’t reflect these students true academic speaking skills. Back to the mnemonic device, I created an acronym that mimics the one my MLs are used to in writing (RACES). Instead, I created SASHES.

SASHES for Speaking

S  = Say the question in sentence form.

A = Analyze all parts of the prompt.

S = Stretch your answer with transitions and conjunctions.

H = Hold the floor or keep talking.

E = Explain everything. Be the teacher.

S  = Sum it up. Restate the question in a new way.

Activities to Go with Each Step of SASHES

S  = Say the question in sentence form (SQS)

Play around with jokes. Have your students say the joke question in a statement instead. For example, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” The chicken crossed the road because…
What is nice about this activity, is it gives students practice with the different question words: who, what, where, when, why, and how. This could lend itself to both lower and upper proficiency levels. In the activities I created, I played with these even further by using anti-jokes. Anti-jokes are deliberately unfunny.

A = Analyze all parts of the prompt

For this step, the best thing you can do is give a lot of opportunities to practice. This step applies to both speaking and writing prompts, so try to collect prompts that work for both RACES and SASHES. Before multilingual learners can successfully answer a constructed-response such as those found on the ACCESS, they need to know how the prompts/questions work. I like Kelly Gallagher’s strategy called the ABCs and D of On Demand Writing adapted from Teaching Adolescent Writers. We will focus on the “A” or “Attack the Prompt”. In this strategy, Gallagher describes the process as:

1. Cross out the words “Write a composition” in the prompt. Crossing these words out helps us prune the prompt, reducing the chances of becoming distracted.
2. Circle any words that ask you to do something. (In the sample prompt you would circle “discuss,” “share,” and “support.” This shows us that the prompt is asking for three things, not just one and helps avoid the problem of only partially answering the prompt.
3. Draw an arrow from each circled word (those words that tell you to do something) to what it specifically tells you to do.
4. Under the prompt, rewrite and number the circled words.  Next to each word, rewrite what the word asks you to do.  This now serves as your prompt- there is no need to look at the entire prompt anymore.

S = Stretch your answer with transitions and conjunctions

 

The key to this step is teaching students to use transitions and conjunctions. My favorite way to teach this is the improvisation game “Yes, and.” The idea of this game is to keep the conversation going by always agreeing with the person before you, then adding on to their thought. You can see how this can lead to stretching of the answers. I always tell my students that teacher don’t want them to use run-on sentences when they write, but for the ACCESS test, we do want run-on sentences when speaking. “Yes, and” promotes this run-on mentality. Alternatively, you could play ‘Yes, but” with the next student adding a contrary statement to the one before.

Three rules for the game:

1. The sentences should match each other in context, or “go together”. They should definitely all help build an elaborate situation.
2. The story should have a problem or multiple problems. In fact, the best Yes, and stories have one problem build upon the next with possible solutions along the way. 
3. The story ends at a natural conclusion, when all the problems have been addressed, and the final solution is satisfying.

Some sample story starters for “Yes, and” [or “Yes, but”] are:

• Suddenly, icy fingers grabbed my arm as I inched through the darkness.
• I suddenly found out that I was heir to a throne…
• She opened the letter and it said she’d won $100,000.
• When I flipped on the radio that night, I couldn’t believe the voice I heard coming through the speakers.
• I still remember the day I was born.
• There was a secret meeting in the morning and she absolutely had to be there

H = Hold the floor or keep talking

Representatives of WIDA have used the term, “Hold the Floor” for what the scorers are looking for on the ACCESS speaking test. This means they want MLs to be able to keep speaking fluently, clearly, and for an extended time. The scorers are looking for the confidence to command the room or “hold the floor.” What can you do to help your multilingual learners feel confident that they can keep talking?

The great news is my favorite strategy is also one of the key strategies to improve both writing and speaking skills: using expanded noun phrases. What do I mean by this? A noun phrase is a noun with modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs. A couple of great ways to practice this concept is through Reader’s Theater scripts for cumulative tales such as “The House that Jack Built” and “I Know an Old Lady”. These cumulative tales have nested noun phrases.

E = Explain Everything

In this penultimate step of SASHES, students need to remember to explain everything. This is the reminder of how they analyzed the prompt. This is when they need to be sure they have answered the question in its entirety. It is also a continuation of “Hold the Floor” in that they need to keep talking, but also be sure the answers they give are complete. An activity idea for this would be to play Explain Everything BINGO. This game encourages them to use as many Talk Moves/Accountable Talk sentence stems and frames. After modeling the stems and frames with your English Learners, challenge your students to use as many as the stems and frames as they can during a week. As a student uses a stem/frame, they mark the spot on their BINGO board. When they get five across/down/diagonal, the student gets a prize. Students should get a new BINGO board for the next week.

 

S = Sum It Up

This strategy is simply the way we want students to conclude their answer. It is always a good idea in writing or speaking to restate the thesis in the conclusion. I like the simple, “This is why..”, bur I do know some teachers who forbid their students from using that sentence starter. I like to create anchor charts with signal words/phrases for my students to use in their speaking (and writing).

Therefore, here is a list of some other sentence starters to use for conclusion sentences:

• In summary….
• To conclude…
• Thus…
• To summarize…
• In short…
• In conclusion…
• To sum up…
• To end with…
• Finally…
• Lastly…
• To finish…
• Overall…
• On the whole…
• As a a result…

If you like the idea of having signal words/phrases anchor charts ready for you, click the image below to see what I created.

WIDA-style Speaking Practices

Finally, I have created many (and counting) speaking practices I would love for you to explore. They range from grades 1-12 on a variety of topics and mostly geared to help Level 3 MLs on the WIDA speaking test. They mimic the style of the WIDA ACCESS speaking test and even have a model student like Nina. Her name is Isabel and she happens to be my patient daughter who allows me to record her to help your students. If you want to test out one of my speaking practices for free, see the Comparing Planets one.  Otherwise, I would love for you to explore the others in my store and see if you like them. All speaking practices are available here on https://nobleenglishlearners.com/store or in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Conclusion

With the use of my Tips and Tricks, SASHES acronym and activites to go with that, and plethora of WIDA style speaking practices, I can help your MLS with their WIDA speaking performance. This has worked for me, so I know it can work for you, too.

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