The Talking Stick Technique

1.  General View of Talking Stick Technique

According to http://google.com, Dr. Locust (1998) says that the talking stick has been used for centuries by many Indian tribes as a means of just and impartial hearing. The talking stick was commonly used in council circles to decide who had the right to speak. When matters of great concern would come before the council, the leading elder would hold the talking stick, and begin the discussion. When he would finish what he had to say, he would hold out the talking stick, and whoever would speak after him would take it. In this manner, the stick would be passed from one individual to another until all who wanted to speak had done so. The stick was then passed back to the elder for safe keeping.

Moreover, based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/talkingstick, the talking stick is used today by many groups, especially in groups of children or adults who need help preventing discussions from degenerating into cacophonies. It can make sure that people listen to what is being said and can help keep an interesting discussion focused. In particular, it is used in talking circles.

Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that talking stick was commonly used in a group of people to decide who had the right to speak. It gives a chance to everyone to speak so that the students need to consider what they hear and what they think before they speak

2.  The Techniques of Talking Stick

According to http://google.com, there are some techniques used by teacher in the process of learning using talking stick such as:

a.    Students make a group in five

b.    Teacher prepares the stick (around 20 cm)

c.    Teacher states the material and gives the students a chance to read and to understand the material on their book

d.   Students discuss the material on group

e.    After they read the material, students have to close their book

f.     Teacher gives the stick to one member, then gives a question related with the material

g.    The students who get the stick have to answer the question. The stick is passed until all the students get the rank to answer  the questions

h.    The other students may help if their member get difficulty to answer the question

i.      Teacher makes a conclusion

3.  The Strengths and Weakness of Talking Stick Technique

There are several strengths of talking stick technique. They are:

a.              Keeps the students alert

Even the best students will find their minds wandering occasionally if there is someone at the front of the room speaking, especially if what is being said is a grammar explanation in a foreign language. If they are contributing to that stage of the lesson or at least know that they could be called upon at any time, there is far less chance that a missing item on their shopping list or something that their ex-girlfriend said to them could drift into their minds. Ways of exploiting this include choosing people at random rather than just going along the row and mixing this up with giving a general question for the whole class to shout out their answers to. The teacher also can combine these by taking the suggestion of one student and asking the whole class if they agree or having anything to add.

b.             Helps the teacher realizes if the students are listening and understanding or not

The lack of an answer makes that they are not listening or are not following the teacher’s explanation and a correct answer makes it clear that they are alert and with the teacher  in teacher’s explanation. If that answer has only come from one person, the teacher will need to make sure everyone else has understood as well with concept checking questions or further elicitation of example sentences, etc.

c.              Helps you find out what they already know

By starting with easy questions and working the teacher way towards more difficult ones, the teacher will be able to boost the students’ confidence with the first ones and realize the limits of their knowledge once their answers start to become incomplete or wrong. Finding out what students do and don't know will also help the teacher to spend lesson time on the most important things, and help the teacher to plan future lessons with that in mind. The teacher can partly overcome these problems by monitoring body language and making sure everyone speaks.

4. It means more student talking time (STT)/ cut down on teacher  talking time (TTT)

The fact that students are responding to almost everything the teacher say in almost every stage of the lesson should mean that they are speaking more often than they would be if they just listening to an explanation by the teacher. This effect can be increased if the teacher can get them commenting on what the other students say in the eliciting stages.

5. Helps students learn how to guess

Communicating in real time is a continual process of guessing- trying to predict what people are going to say, trying to work out their attitude by their tone of voice and body language, etc etc. Many students lack this skill or are shy about using it in the foreign language classroom, and getting them used to guessing the answer to almost everything you say by eliciting can really help with this. To make sure they are happy to make a guess when you are eliciting, teacher need to give positive feedback for any kind of contribution, standing close to people with quiet voices when they answer so that they don't misinterpret not hearing them as lack of understanding, and asking questions that have many possible correct answers.

6. Students can learn/ be exposed to useful incidental language during elicitation

Incidental language is language that the teacher doesn’t teach but still hope that students pick up during their interactions in the classroom. Phrases they should learn how to understand and then maybe go on to be able to use (or at least be ready to learn consciously when they come up in the syllabus) from elicitation.

7. Can show the students how to work things out for themselves

This is really just an aspect of the point above. Telling students that "Obstruction is the noun of obstruct" is obviously quick and might even be listened to and understood, especially if teacher writes it up on the board in some way at the same time. However, there is often a reason to take the time to elicit with "What kind of word is 'action'?... A noun, good. And what word does it come from? Is there a similar word that is an adjective, an adverb, a verb etc that is similar? Try taking off some of the letters towards the end... 'Act', good! What kind of verb is 'act'? then the teacher says 'He is acting', so what kind of word is it in that sentence?... 'V'. Sure, that's right, that's what it says in your dictionary. 'V' stands for 'verb'. So, 'act' is the verb and 'action' is the noun. This is a rather long example but this could be worthwhile because it has taught students some useful grammatical terminology and, more importantly, shown them how to analyze word formation for themselves.

Several weaknesses can also be found in talking stick technique. They are:

a.       Time consuming

If students are getting more speaking during that time and are learning useful language analysis skills and incidental language this doesn't have to be a reason to abandon it, but it can still mean that students have forgotten about what the listening is supposed to be about by the time the vocabulary pre-teach finishes. Ways of avoiding this problem include: plan the elicitation and make sure the teacher has found the quickest way, use pictures and other prompts if that will cut down on the amount of time eliciting will take, and teach them the grammatical jargon etc that they will need to understand when the teacher is eliciting (maybe dedicating a whole section of a lesson to it).

b.      It doesn't always lead to more STT

If the elicitation is much longer than the thing to elicit, it can actually mean more TTT than if the teacher had just given them the answer. A general rule is to make the question shorter than the answers. If that is impossible, explaining might be better than eliciting at that stage.

c.       One student can dominate answering your elicitation questions

Solutions include: nominate particular people to answer, give them the elicitation stage written down to go through with a partner, follow all their answers up with requests for additional ideas from the other students, or occasionally tell them that the teacher would like someone else to answer.

d.      It can be met by silence

This could mean that students don't know the answer, that they do know the answer but aren't confident, that they would know the answer but haven't understood the teacher’s elicitation, that the people who do know the answer are too shy to speak, that the person who knows the answer is trying to avoid dominating the class, that giving the right answer before everyone else might seem like boasting, that they have been put off answering by getting so many previous answers wrong, that they know the teacher always give the answer if they wait long enough, that they expect to be asked individually, that they don't understand that teacher really want people to speak out, or even that they are refusing to take part because they are unhappy with the teaching methodology of the teacher. Knowing how to reduce the problem of silence depends firstly on the teacher being able to identify which of these reasons is the most important for class or a particular student.