Rejoinders may be one of the most important practical vocabulary items we teach students. As we use the target language in our classrooms we model rejoinders and we encourage students to use them because they are so helpful in keeping a conversation going. Using a rejoinder is an easy way of showing the other person that you understand and that you want them to keep talking to you. It shows that you are emotionally engaged in the conversation and it encourages the other person to keep speaking. Rejoinders help to keep other people going to you, but you do not need to say a lot. You just listen and nod and say, “That’s interesting!” And that is precisely language id acquired—by getting interesting, comprehensible input!
 
Here is a transcript of a short conversation that jumped out at me years ago as I was first experimenting and developing my rejoinders lists. It was a brief exchange between Vice-president Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner just before president Obama’s speech to Congress on 9/8/11. Notice the difference in the number of words per speaker in this brief back-and-forth. Boehner does almost all of the talking. He uses 130 words to Biden’s 6. Biden is cordially participating in the conversation, by reacting and encouraging Boehner to keep on talking without producing much language. We can teach our students to do something similar: to keep conversations going at a very low linguistic cost by teaching them to use rejoinders naturally in the classroom.
 
Boehner: “I played a little golf in August, and I was at Dismal River Golf Club out in Sand Hills, Neb. It’s in the middle of nowhere. One of the hardest golf courses you’ll ever want to see. Sand Hills and Dismal. Seven birdies, five bogeys, I shoot two under.”
 
Biden: “You’re kidding me!”
 
Boehner: “So we have lunch, sitting around for about an hour, and I thought, ‘why don’t we go play nine more holes?’ Six pars, three birdies, and I missed a four-foot, straight-in birdie on the last hole.”
 
Biden: “Whoa!”
 
Boehner: “So the next day I go to Sand Hills, I shoot 86. One day I play great, the next day I play awful. But this was the round of the decade.”
 
Biden: “That’s incredible!”
 
Boehner: “I haven’t done this in 12 years, I shot 67 one time down…”
 
Biden’s reactions are a great model for a language learner. Rejoinders keep the conversation going! Boehner was doing most of the talking and Biden was keeping him going. Biden was getting interesting comprehensible input at a low language and cognitive cost. He could have been purposefully modeling what Dr. Krashen was explaining here:
 
“The input hypothesis maintains that speaking does not directly result I language acquisition: talking is not practicing. If you practice your French out loud every morning in front of the mirror, your French will not improve. Rather, the ability to speak is the result of language acquisition, not a cause. Speaking can help language acquisition indirectly, however. First, it can result in conversation, and conversation is an excellent source of comprehensible input, even though what counts in conversation, however, is what the other person says to you, not what you say to them. I suspect that speaking can help in another way: It can make you fell more like a user of the second language, like a member of the “club.”
 
(Stephen Krashen, Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use, p. 5)
 
If you have Rejoinders Posters in your classroom they will remind you to use them, to stay in bounds when you do, and to have them available to your students so they can express themselves.

You can get the Classroom Rejoinders Posters and student rejoinder “Cheat Sheets” here: http://www.brycehedstrom.com/product/rejoinders-class-bundle