Choice Words

How Our Language Affects Children's Learning

By: Peter H. Johnston

Narrated by: Peter H. Johnston

In productive classrooms, teachers don't just teach children skills, they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities. Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings.

Choice Words shows how teachers accomplish this using their most powerful teaching tool: language. Throughout, Peter Johnston provides examples of apparently ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a study by accomplished literacy teachers, the book demonstrates how the things we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Through language, children learn how to become strategic thinkers.

In addition, Johnston examines the complex learning that teachers produce in classrooms - which is hard to name and thus is not recognized by tests, by policy-makers, by the general public, and often by teachers themselves, yet is vitally important.

This audiobook will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2004 Peter H. Johnston (P)2007 Stenhouse Publishers

Critic reviews

"Choice Words is perhaps the most powerful and teacher-friendly book ever published." (Instructor Magazine)

Quick listen, valuable information

Purposeful, precise, and insightful. Choice words offers a closer look at how language can allow students to deepen their learning and offer a model for their own language development. Pairs greatly with other educational reading.

Good Basic Language to Consider

Lots of good ideas for important ways to talk to kids. Ideas include using choice words to develop positive identify, curiosity, collaboration, and confidence. Enjoyed stories to help explain use of choice words, but would have liked more. Some parts more wordy and hard to process concepts.

I wanted to like this.

Very theoretical. Not so practical. I love every idea in theory but it helped 1% in my daily interactions. Emotion Coaching is much more user friendly.

Great Insights

This book offers excellent insights for creating a classroom of genuine learners. I especially liked the chapter on developing agency in our students.

Small changes, with BIG impacts!

It isn't often we think hard before we speak, but our words have great power and every word we utter can be a determining factor in someone's life. Our words can make or break a person's spirit. They can build a person up and set them up for success if we choose the words we use carefully and with good intent. I love that this is a short read, as I am in constant need of reminding to choose my words! Each time I read it I try to better my choices in the words I use every day.