The Two Conversations Classroom: A Complete, Student-Centered Approach to Teaching a Second Language

This book presents a highly student-centered approach to teaching a language.

Language courses are often designed around thematic content. It is traditionally assumed that it is the teacher's job to make sure that students are interested in a thematic unit, such as a unit on parts of the house. The teacher develops activities to force students to use language that may not interest them. In the end, the teacher develops assessments to force students to pay close attention. The students’ interests are the last to be considered when planning the school year.

However, if we focus on who we are teaching, rather than what we are teaching, the class content emerges naturally from our class conversations. Not only is it easier for the language teacher to develop a compelling and enjoyable language experience by centering the lives of actual students as the content of each class, but it is also more likely to generate language that students find relevant. Class time is no longer wasted on a list of words that students resist learning; instead, we focus on communicating messages that are pertinent and interesting to the students in the classroom.

This book presents many classroom techniques to structure conversations in the target language with the goal of discovering who we are teaching. As these class conversations grow, our students’ proficiency in the target language also grows.

After years of focusing class on my students’ lives, I realized that I also wanted to carve out more time discussing the target language cultures that are foreign to many of my students. We developed a balance between two class conversations: a student-centered conversation that I call “Student Voices Activities” and another conversation where we explore what I call “Voices of Others”.

Finally, we added a beginning of class routine and an end of class routine. The beginning of class routine develops the skills of independent readers and eventually leads to a full pleasure reading session in the first ten minutes of class. The end of class routine provides a written summary of the class through a community writing technique called Write & Discuss. There is also an extremely easy daily exit quiz about our class conversations that ensures that all students are following along with the content generated in class.

Thus was born “The Two Conversation Classroom”. This approach supported an extremely successful language program in a high-poverty public school system. While we still dealt with high-absenteeism and a culture of not doing homework, our program developed a 100% pass rate on AP and IB exams. More importantly, we became happier students and happier teachers as our classrooms became refuges rather than sources of conflict.