Five Things I’ve Noticed About Talk in New Zealand Classrooms
- Del Costello
- Aug 8
- 7 min read
Del Costello July 2026
Over many years of working alongside teachers, school leaders and education communities, I have spent a great deal of time listening. I listen to the way teachers explain ideas, invite responses and build conversations. I listen to the questions students are asked, the time they are given to think and whose voices are most often heard.
I also notice the moments when talk opens learning up, and the moments when it unintentionally closes learning down.
There is excellent oral language practice happening across Aotearoa New Zealand. There are classrooms filled with rich discussion, purposeful questioning, storytelling, debate, humour, curiosity and genuine dialogue.
But there is also considerable variation. Too often, we assume that because classrooms are busy and voices can be heard, meaningful talk is taking place. Yet not all talk contributes equally to language development, learning, identity and belonging.
Here are five things I have noticed about talk in New Zealand Classrooms.
1. There is often plenty of teacher talk, but not always enough student talk
Teachers need to talk. They explain, model, clarify, guide, question and connect ideas. Effective explicit teaching depends on clear teacher language.
The issue is not that teachers talk.
The issue is whether students have enough meaningful opportunities to use language themselves.
In many classrooms, the teacher still does most of the cognitive and linguistic work. The teacher asks the questions, selects the speaker, evaluates the answer and then moves the lesson forward. Students may contribute a word, a short phrase or the answer they believe the teacher is looking for, but they do not always have the opportunity to explain their reasoning, build on another person’s idea, test language or revise their thinking through conversation.
Students do not develop sophisticated oral language simply by listening to sophisticated oral language. They need opportunities to produce it. They need to describe, justify, compare, retell, question, clarify, negotiate and disagree respectfully. They need to put their thoughts into words and discover, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, what they actually think.
The goal is not to reduce effective teacher instruction. It is to create a better balance between teacher explanation and purposeful student contribution.
2. The students who most need to talk can be the least likely to be heard
Classroom talk is rarely distributed evenly.
Some students are confident, quick to respond and familiar with the language patterns of school. They know when to speak, how long an answer should be and what kind of response a teacher is likely to value.
Other students may need more processing time. They may be learning English as an additional language, communicating in more than one language, navigating speech or language differences, or simply feeling uncertain about whether their contribution will be welcomed. Students who communicate differently can easily become observers of classroom talk rather than active participants in it. When teachers rely heavily on hands-up questioning or rapid whole-class responses, the same voices can dominate. This creates a concerning cycle: students who are already confident receive more opportunities to speak, while students who need more practice receive less.
That is how inequity can become embedded in ordinary classroom routines.
Participation needs to be designed, not left to chance.
Talk partners, rehearsal time, visual supports, sentence frames, small-group discussion and deliberate wait time can create safer entry points. These approaches should not become rigid routines, but they can help teachers widen participation and make thinking more visible.
An equitable classroom is not one in which every child speaks for exactly the same amount of time. It is one in which every child has genuine, supported opportunities to contribute and be heard.
3. We sometimes confuse answering questions with developing oral language
Questioning is an important part of teaching, but answering a sequence of teacher questions is not the same as sustaining a conversation.
A student may correctly answer:
“Where did the character go?”
“What is seven multiplied by eight?”
“Which material is waterproof?”
These answers demonstrate knowledge, but they may require very little extended language.
Oral language develops when students are asked to do more with their ideas:
“What makes you think that?”
“Can you explain how you worked it out?”
“How is your idea similar to Maia’s?”
“What might someone who disagrees say?”
“Can you retell that in your own words?”
“What changed your thinking?”
These prompts invite elaboration, reasoning and connection.
However, the quality of talk is not created by questions alone. It also depends on how adults respond.
When a teacher takes a child’s contribution seriously, adds language, makes a connection or returns the idea to the group, the conversation expands. When every response is quickly judged as right or wrong, talk can become a performance rather than a process for learning.
Students need to know that classroom dialogue is not simply a test of whether they already know the answer. It is one of the ways they develop understanding.
4. Cultural and linguistic knowledge is present, but it is not always given room to shape the conversation
Every classroom in Aotearoa New Zealand contains rich language and cultural knowledge.
Students arrive with family stories, expressions, humour, values, languages, ways of listening and ways of participating. They bring knowledge developed through whakapapa, whenua, whānau, church, community, sport, migration, work and everyday life.
Yet classroom talk can still privilege a relatively narrow version of communication: speaking quickly, individually, confidently and in a particular form of academic English.
A Te Ao Māori perspective reminds us that language is relational. Kōrero is connected to whakapapa, identity, collective knowledge and belonging. Knowledge is not always produced through individual answers. It may be developed through listening, observation, shared storytelling, waiata, metaphor, humour and connection across generations.
Pacific perspectives similarly remind us that communication is grounded in relationships, family, spirituality, respect and collective identity. Silence may not represent disengagement. Listening may be an active and respectful form of participation. A student’s confidence may change depending on the relationships, language and context around them.
Te reo Māori and Pacific languages should not appear only through greetings, labels or occasional celebrations. They carry ways of seeing, organising and expressing knowledge.
Culturally sustaining talk does more than allow students to use what they already know. It lets their knowledge influence what the class discusses, how ideas are explored and what counts as a meaningful contribution.
This requires educators to be curious about communication rather than making quick judgements about it.
Who speaks first?
Who is expected to make eye contact?
What does respectful disagreement sound like?
When is it appropriate to speak as an individual, and when might a collective response be more culturally congruent?
Whose stories are being invited into the room?
These are pedagogical questions, but they are also questions of identity, power and belonging.
5. Talk is often valued, but it is not always planned or taught explicitly
Most teachers agree that oral language matters.
It is frequently included in school goals, literacy plans and curriculum discussions. Teachers may encourage discussion, ask students to share ideas and provide opportunities for group work. But oral language is not always planned with the same precision as reading, writing or mathematics. We sometimes expect students to “have a discussion” without teaching them how to enter one, maintain it, build on another speaker’s idea or disagree productively. We may ask students to retell, explain or present without first modelling the language structures involved. We may place students in groups and assume collaboration will naturally follow.
Purposeful talk needs to be taught.
Students benefit when teachers explicitly model and practise language such as:
“I agree with that idea because…”
“I see it differently…”
“Can you explain what you mean by…?”
“My evidence is…”
“I would like to add…”
“First…, then…, as a result…”
These structures are not scripts children should depend on forever. They are scaffolds that help students gain entry to increasingly complex forms of communication.
Planning for talk also means being clear about its purpose.
Are students talking to retrieve prior knowledge?
To rehearse before writing?
To explore an uncertain idea?
To learn new vocabulary?
To solve a problem?
To build relationships?
To challenge a perspective?
To tell and retell stories?
When the purpose is clear, teachers can make better decisions about groupings, prompts, vocabulary, modelling, timing and support.
Talk is not an optional extra
Oral language is sometimes treated as something that happens before the “real” learning begins. I see it differently.
Talk is one of the main ways learning happens.
It is how students connect new ideas to prior knowledge. It is how they rehearse language before writing, clarify confusion, test theories, build relationships and develop a sense of themselves as capable contributors.
Talk also gives teachers access to student thinking. A completed worksheet may show whether an answer is correct. A conversation can reveal how a student reached the answer, which concepts they understand, where a misconception began and what they might be ready to learn next.
This is why strong oral language practice cannot be reduced to encouraging children to “speak more.” We must consider the quality, purpose, accessibility and cultural positioning of classroom talk.
We need to ask:
Who is doing the talking?
Who is doing the thinking?
Whose language is valued?
Who has time to rehearse?
Who is regularly interrupted or overlooked?
What forms of participation are recognised?
What happens to a student’s contribution after it is offered?
A challenge for educators and leaders
My challenge is not to fill every lesson with more noise. It is to become more deliberate about the talk that already exists.
Choose one lesson and listen carefully.
Notice who contributes and who does not.
Notice whether students are producing individual words or connected ideas.
Notice how long you wait after asking a question.
Notice whether students respond only to you, or whether they listen and respond to one another.
Notice whose cultural and linguistic knowledge shapes the discussion.
Then identify one small shift.
It might be providing rehearsal time before students speak.
It might be asking one follow-up question rather than moving immediately to the next student.
It might be teaching a sentence structure that supports reasoning.
It might be inviting students to discuss an idea in the language in which they think most confidently before sharing in English.
It might be replacing “Who knows the answer?” with “What are you noticing?”
Small shifts in classroom talk can create substantial changes in participation, confidence and learning.
Because when we strengthen talk, we do more than improve speaking and listening.
We strengthen literacy.
We strengthen thinking.
We strengthen relationships.
We strengthen identity and belonging.
Most importantly, we create classrooms in which more students can find, develop and use their voices.
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