5.5 Communication & Media Literacy: Speaking, Listening, Research & Multimedia

5.5 Communication & Media Literacy: Speaking, Listening, Research & Multimedia

Competency 5 of Subtest 601 (about 10% of the subtest) covers oral communication and media literacy. The five skills ask you to identify listening and speaking strategies, teach collaborative discussion, teach research with reliable sources, teach ethical use of information, and help students choose multimedia elements. Oral language is the foundation that reading and writing are built on, so these skills also support comprehension across the day.

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Speaking and Listening Strategies

Effective speakers and listeners use strategies that can be named, modeled, and practiced:

Two cautions matter. First, listening is active: good listeners take notes, ask questions, and paraphrase, and they do more than stay quiet. Second, norms for eye contact and gestures vary across cultures and among students with disabilities, so teach expectations explicitly and accept reasonable variation rather than penalizing a student for looking away.

Preparing Students for Presentations

Before an oral book talk or report, teach and rehearse:

1. Volume and rate: loud enough for the back row, and slow enough that listeners can follow.
2. Expression: vary pitch and emphasis on key words, as in readers theatre.
3. Eye contact and posture: look up from note cards at the end of each idea, stand evenly, and keep hands free for purposeful gestures.
4. Audience awareness: define unfamiliar terms and adjust formality (register) for the audience.

Active Listening and Collaborative Speaking Protocols

Oral language is the foundation upon which written literacy is built. Structured academic conversations accelerate reading comprehension, critical thinking, and vocabulary acquisition.

Accountable Talk Stems

Teachers explicitly post and practice sentence stems that model civil, evidence-based academic discourse:

• Building and Extending: "I agree with [Peer] because..., and I would add that..."
• Seeking Clarification: "Could you explain what you meant when you said...?"
• Citing Textual Evidence: "On page [number], the text states that..., which supports my idea that..."
• Respectful Dissent: "I see your point, but I interpreted the character's actions differently because..."

Structured Academic Discussion Protocols

• Think-Pair-Share: The teacher poses a high-level question, gives students silent 'think time' to formulate an idea, prompts them to turn to an assigned partner to share their reasoning, and then calls on pairs to share with the whole class. This structure guarantees 100% active engagement and provides oral rehearsal before whole-class sharing.
• Fishbowl Discussions: An inner circle of 4 to 5 students conducts an academic discussion about a text, while an outer circle of students silently observes, taking notes on the inner circle's use of text evidence, turn-taking, and active listening. Roles rotate halfway through the period.
• Turn and Talk: Rapid, 1- to 2-minute partner exchanges embedded throughout whole-class direct instruction to maintain engagement and provide processing time.

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Teaching Inquiry, Research & Information Literacy

In the digital age, elementary students must learn to navigate, evaluate, and synthesize information from diverse media sources ethically and critically.

Evaluating Source Credibility: The CRAAP Framework

Teachers guide upper elementary students to become critical consumers of information using adapted criteria from the CRAAP test:

• Currency: When was the information published or updated? (Is an article about solar system exploration from 1995 still accurate?)
• Relevance: Does the source directly answer the research question, and is it written at an appropriate comprehension level?
• Authority: Who is the author or publisher? What are their qualifications and credentials? (Is the author a climate scientist or an anonymous blogger?)
• Accuracy: Is the information supported by verifiable evidence, citations, and data? Can the facts be cross-referenced in other reputable sources?
• Purpose: Why did the author create this source? (To inform, teach, entertain, persuade, or sell a commercial product? Is there visible bias?)

Web Domain Literacy: Teach students to evaluate top-level domains: .gov (government agencies—highest reliability for factual data), .edu (educational institutions—academic research), .org (non-profit organizations—valuable, but check for advocacy bias), and .com (commercial entities—often contain advertising or sponsored content).

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Students conducting research should also classify each source they use:

• Primary Sources: Firsthand, contemporary evidence created by individuals who directly experienced or witnessed an event.
  • Examples: Historical diaries, letters, original photographs, video recordings of speeches, legal documents, treaties, artifacts, oral histories, and eyewitness accounts.
• Secondary Sources: Secondhand interpretations, analyses, reviews, or summaries created by individuals who did not personally experience the event, often synthesizing multiple primary sources.
  • Examples: History textbooks, biographies, encyclopedias, scholarly articles, and documentary films.

Note-Taking Systems and Paraphrasing

Elementary students frequently struggle with research because they resort to copying sentences word-for-word. Teachers instruct students in:

• Two-Column Note-Taking (Cornell Style): Recording facts and direct observations in the right column, and writing personal questions, reactions, and summary labels in the left column.
• The 'Read, Cover, Think, Write' Protocol: Students read a paragraph from a source, cover the text with an index card, think about the core idea, and write the concept down in their own words. This scaffold teaches authentic paraphrasing and prevents plagiarism.
• Ethical Citation: Teaching students that intellectual property belongs to the creator. Elementary citations include author, title, publication year, and source website or publisher.

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Integrating Multimedia Tools in Student Presentations

Modern communication requires students to synthesize linguistic, visual, and auditory modalities. Rather than limiting student output to handwritten reports, teachers integrate multimedia tools to enhance communication:

• Digital Slide Decks (Google Slides, PowerPoint): Teaching students presentation design principles—limiting text on slides (avoiding walls of text), using bullet points for key ideas, and selecting high-contrast, relevant visual imagery that supports rather than distracts from the spoken presentation.
• Audio Recordings and Podcasts: Students use digital audio recording tools to record book reviews, historical interviews, or poetry readings. Audio production develops oral reading fluency, prosody, and voice modulation.
• Visual Infographics: Using student-friendly digital design platforms (such as Canva) to synthesize research data into visual charts, timelines, and diagrams.
• Video Presentations and Screencasts: Creating short video documentaries or screencast presentations to demonstrate step-by-step science experiments or mathematical problem-solving.

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Classroom Scenario: Research With Primary and Secondary Sources

A fifth-grade class conducts research on the American Revolution. The teacher designs a station activity where students evaluate two historical sources: Source A is a digitized diary entry written by a private soldier at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–78, and Source B is a chapter from a 2024 published history textbook analyzing the military strategy of the encampment. The teacher guides students to classify Source A as a primary source (providing immediate firsthand emotional and physical evidence of camp conditions) and Source B as a secondary source (providing retrospective historical analysis, map overviews, and casualty statistics). Students practice synthesizing information from both sources into a digital multimedia presentation using proper ethical citations.