Oral Language Strategies

Chapter 2 of Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom is about using Oral Language to check for understanding.  Throughout the chapter, Fisher and Frey offer several strategies that I find helpful. 
1. Accountable talk- students have partner or small group discussions that  are monitored my the instructor.  Based on the contest covered in the discussions, the instructor will have a good ideas of patterns of confusion or gaps that still exist in the instruction.
2. Noticing nonverbal cues- the instructor remains watchful to pick up on frustration, confusion, or that "aha moment"
3. Value lineups- "a structure for fostering peer discourse based on students' opinions about an academic topic."  Though this can be difficult to do with a large class, it is doable- I have done this many times.  However, I have found that it may be easier to do if you move the class outside.  The description in the book says that students are to line up according to how strongly they agree or disagree with a given statement.  the line is then folded in half "so that the students who most strongly agreed and disagreed wit one another are now face to face."   I do not do it this way, though.  I split the line in half and match the lines so the student who disagrees the strongest is matched up with a student in the middle.  The same goes for the student who agrees the strongest.  If you match them up as Fisher and Frey suggest, you will end up with students who are closest to the middle and will agree with each other.  This makes for a boring discussion. 
4.  Retellings- "new accounts or adaptations of a text that allow students to consider information and then summarize, orally, what they understand about this information." 
5.  Think-Pair-Share- students are given time to think, they share this thinking with their partners, and then the partners share out to the class.  I use this strategy quite a bit. 

The important thing about formative assessment is that it ceases to be formative if it does not inform instruction.  If an instructor is not careful, it is possible to conduct any of the activities above and neglect feedback and reflection.