I decided to devote my university budget to buying a collection of teacher handbooks. I bought up as many of Jill Hadfield’s collections of communicative classroom activities as I could, the first one being Elementary Communication Games. The students’ faces lit up as they mingled with each other, speaking English as they problem-solved according to the specifications on their role-play cards. Then I tried a simple technique suited to generating discussion on a particular theme, by assigning students to random pairs. If there were 20 students in the class I would number the students on the left from one to ten, and those on the right from one to ten. I would then call on each student to tell me their number, to let me know that they hadn’t forgotten it. Then I called on the “Number Ones” to turn and make eye contact with each other, followed by the “Number Twos,” until I reached the “Number Tens.” Then I would tell each pair where to sit, starting with the “Number Ones” in the front row and moving progressively backwards to “Number Fives” on my left, and “Number Sixes” to “Number Tens” on my right. The students would then turn to their partner, and talk about the specified topic. At this point I was keenly observing the body language and facial expressions of the students. Most of them were angled towards their partner, and more importantly, many were smiling as they talked. This was the most important signal of engagement and concentration.

Next, it was time to continue the discussion with a new partner. The students in the inner circle moved one desk in a clockwise direction to talk with a new partner about the same topic. The inner circle continued rotating in this way for several more turns.

The advantage of this technique was that rather than letting students choose a partner themselves, no students were left scrambling trying to find a partner. Students got to meet more members of the class than they would have if they had just partnered with their friends. Also, if they were talking with a new person they would be more likely to speak in English rather than revert to their habit of speaking Japanese with their friends. I could sense the happy and upbeat mood of the class as a whole.

Observing facial expressions is an intuitive measure of student engagement but not necessarily cognition. The latter is facilitated in the act of talking. The most persuasive exposition of this is Vygotsky’s Thought and Language (2012): “Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them” (p. 266). Hopkins (2010) concurs: “Language pulls cognition out of our mouths” (p. 116). 

For the next twenty years after the day of being critiqued by my supervisor for dominating the floor space, I continued to delegate talking time to the students. I maintained this practice on Zoom during the pandemic. In the required classes I had them talk in random pairs, and in the advanced classes I had them give regular presentations. The behaviour I had noticed the first time I had students engage in talk continued over these twenty years, no matter whether they were beginning or advanced learners. Yawns were replaced by smiles, which indicated to me not only that most of them were happy and relaxed, but also that they were actively engaged with both new ideas and each other.