How should we work with students in middle schools (11-13 years old) to promote language development?

1. Social interaction becomes increasingly important for middle schoolers, which presents both opportunities and challenges for their teachers. When well organised, group work can provide opportunities to expose children to different perspectives and to develop their communication skills. 2. Creating groups that are developmentally and culturally diverse provides students with opportunities to learn from each other. 3. Middle schoolers' listening skills are still developing, so writing definitions and other important ideas on the board or document camera is important. 4. Middle schoolers' listening skills and complex sentence structures and their understanding of figurative speech and metaphorical language are also developing. Using these metaphors and similes provide opportunities to talk about language and its central role in communication (Berk, 2013).