Listening Triads Discussion Strategy: Explanation

This activity is highly structured.

Listening is given prominence and learners get an opportunity to take on different roles.

Divide the class into groups of three.

Each group must assign the following roles:

• Talker: This person will contribute the most to the discussion. It is their job to talk at length about the topic.
• Questioner: The questioner will make some contributions to the discussion. Their main role, however, is to ask questions of clarification and to prompt the talker.
• Listener: This role requires the learner to listen carefully to the discussion and to record the key points. When the discussion is finished, the listener should feed back to the other members of the group. They should go over what was talked about in the discussion and provide a peer-assessment of the talker and the questioner.

The teacher announces the first discussion topic.

Conversations begin, with group members taking on their assigned roles.

After an appropriate amount of time has passed, the teacher announces the end of the discussion and asks the listeners to report back to their groups.

Next, group members are asked to rotate roles.

A new discussion topic is introduced, and conversations restart.

The process continues, and includes a third rotation to ensure each group member gets a turn at each of the roles.

Listening Triads Discussion Strategy: Example

Topic: Human Rights

Learners get into groups of three and assign roles.

The teacher has decided that the following questions will be discussed in turn:

• Should everybody have human rights?
• Do we need a law that protects people’s human rights?
• What problems might human rights cause?

Each rotation sees the listener feeding back on the discussion to their peers.

The advantage of this is twofold.

First, by revisiting what was talked about and, hopefully, analysing it, the group are better placed for their next discussion.

This should mean the quality of the discussion increases each time.

Second, by providing a peer-assessment of what the talker and the questioner did, the listener causes the whole group to reflect on what it means to discuss well.

Again, this should lead to a progressive improvement in the quality of the discussions.

As can be seen from this example, Listening Triads can be a particularly good way to scaffold a piece of extended writing.

The nature of the activity means learners get an opportunity to think, speak, question, listen and reflect on a topic.

In addition, a series of notes are created that can be referred to after the activity has finished (potentially while learners are doing their extended writing).

Listening Triads Discussion Strategy: Extensions and Developments

1. Ask the second and third talkers to make a point of connecting what they say to what was previously said. Encouraging talkers to contribute in this way helps them make links between different parts of the topic. Assign the task of assessing the connections to the listeners. They should note down each time a connection is made and then relay this to the talkers and questioners at the end of the discussion.
2. The activity works well when used regularly. Using it time and again across a term, or longer, helps learners refine the skills each role demands. In so doing they become more adept at the activity and are increasingly likely to get a lot out of each discussion.
3. Play around with the questioner role. You could get rid of it altogether and have two talkers. You could give questioners a set of questions they can use as a prompt, helping them to keep the discussion going. Or you could give them a set of question stems as a scaffold they can use to develop their own questions.