Oracy: Four Interconnected Aspects

A guest post by Barbara Bleiman

Learning to talk, learning through talk

There has been lots of debate in recent months about oracy and what it is. There are many different ‘definitions’ ranging from the narrowest idea of ‘teaching children how to speak and listen well’ through to much more complex and all-embracing ideas.

Dictionary definitions are, by definition, limited and limiting. One might question why we need to pin it down in this way, given that it was a term that only originated in the 1970s, coined by Andrew Wilkinson to give value to an area of learning that had been under-valued and under-represented.

The only reason for defining it carefully is to explore the richness of what it might include in children’s education, not to say ‘well, that’s not oracy, so let’s not include that!’ What it includes is something that can shift and develop and expand as expertise and understanding grows.

The Oracy Education Commission podcasts are a testament to that idea, bringing in multiple angles, from formal rhetoric, to drama, philosophy for children, the relationship between talk and reading development, early years language, the role of oral storytelling, speech, language, mental health and a whole lot more, including raising questions about misunderstandings about speech and writing and the potential damage of deficit models of working class and minoritised language practices.

It is so much more than teaching children how to make a speech, engage in a formal debate or be interviewed – though it is those things too!

A few years ago, I found myself, in numerous forums, making the case that oracy includes two major aspects: Learning to Talk, and Talk for Learning. It seemed to me that the vital role of talk and the value of dialogic learning, for all subjects, and all stages of learning, had been sidelined, and sometimes even derided, in discussions about oracy.

Now, thank goodness, that aspect is being fully recognised. At secondary level, whether it’s in Maths, Science, History or English there are strong arguments for using productive talk as a means of deepening understanding, consolidating learning and giving students confidence in grappling with the disciplinary practices and knowledge of subjects.

Students can talk and think their way into knowledge. Professor Neil Mercer’s concept of ‘interthinking’, whereby you think better by talking and thinking together is helpful in explaining why peer talk is an important aspect of this. Of course, there are overlaps between Talk for Learning and Learning to Talk  –  you can’t talk productively unless you have a degree of confidence and experience of talking in groups, or in classrooms, and know what good talk sounds and looks like.

However, there are also differences. From a teaching perspective, you don’t need to ‘judge’ students’ talk for its own sake, but rather for how much it contributes to their learning of other things, and any judgements you might make will be different.

For instance, fluency is not at a premium in talk for learning – here, lack of fluency may well be a good sign of hard thinking going on. The Bullock Report made much of the need for a relaxed enough classroom environment for students to ‘float their own notions’ without fear of being judged. (Bullock also had a lovely phrase about students ‘stretching’ their own language to meet new demands in classrooms where dialogue is possible, and students feel unafraid to try out new language.)

Talk for social justice

At the risk of complicating things, there are two other big areas of talk that I’d like to see included in any teacher discussions of what oracy might mean for their school, department or own classroom. Again, they are not separate silos or compartments, but integrally related to the other two.

First there is the question of Student Voice – sometimes referred to as Talk for Social Justice. This is about students being heard, about their voices being respected, valued and seen as important. It might include talk within the whole school environment – in school councils, assemblies, student representation on working groups, and students being given opportunities to develop their public, outward-facing voices. But, as with all the other aspects of talk, it also applies within classrooms, to learning.

Listening to students and what they can tell teachers about their learning is a vital, and perhaps under-discussed, aspect of oracy. If you don’t make space to hear students talking about their work, as a teacher you deny yourself an important window into their learning that allows your teaching to be more responsive, more readily adaptable on the basis of what they know or don’t know, their interests, their knowledge from outside the classroom, their own feelings about what is especially helpful to them in their learning.

A classroom where students are silent and only answer narrowly determined questions in an IRE format (Initiation-Response-Evaluation), sometimes also known as IRF, with F standing for Feedback, is one where students’ own contribution and agency in their own learning is also highly constrained.

Anecdotally, in the English and Media Centre (EMC) project ‘It’s Good to Talk’ (and in other instances of teachers I’ve worked with, opening up their classrooms to more dialogic approaches), I have been struck by the number of occasions when the teachers involved commented with shock and surprise about some aspect of their students’ knowledge from outside the classroom, or the depth of their insight into something being shared in the class. ‘I didn’t realise that she wrote poetry in her spare time / had such interesting ideas about… / could express herself so well / I was unnecessarily worried about the quality of her writing…’ and so on.

Learning about talk

Finally – and this is where this blog is leading – I think everything hinges on a fourth aspect of oracy education, which is knowledge about language, and about spoken language as opposed to written language. This is essential, in my view, both for teachers teaching oracy, in every subject, and for students.

For teachers to be able to make good judgements about what ‘good’ talk is (in both the Learning How to Talk and the Talk for Learning aspects of oracy) they need to themselves have thought hard about the nature of spoken language. They need to understand that it’s not the same as writing. And they need some solid linguistic knowledge.

So, for instance, the idea that good talk involves ‘talking in full sentences’ is linguistic nonsense. There is no such thing as the ‘sentence’ in talk  – that’s a construct based on writing only. Nearly all spontaneous, as opposed to scripted, talk involves backtracking, pauses, hesitations, fillers, false starts and so on. Teachers need to be aware that in group discussion, fillers, pauses and such like often perform a valuable function, not just for the speaker but also for the listener. There’s plenty of research on this, some of it by the linguists talking on the Oracy Commission podcasts – for instance, Deborah Cameron, Rob Drummond and Ian Cushing. This article provides a light touch introduction to the important and varied functions of fillers in conversation.

Equally, it’s hugely important that teachers understand what standard English is, as well as the fact that linguists challenge whether there is even such a thing as spoken standard English.

They need to be aware that linguistically, so-called standard English is no more ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ than any other variation, social, geographical or generational, as well as being aware of the dangers of accentism – discrimination against people because of their accent, whether class-related or regional.

They need to understand the concept of, and debates around, code-switching , and how most young people (as well as adults) are highly adept at adjusting their register and style for multiple different contexts – in their friendship groups, with parents, teachers, other adults, in formal settings such as interviews, and so on.

Interestingly, teachers themselves, on social media (a kind of hybrid spoken/written form) can be observed doing this very thing, using colloquial spoken language as a way of gaining high prestige with their teacher peers. Here are just a few examples from the Twitter feeds of one or two high-profile educators:

‘One movement lads smooth as’

‘Nah. No way!’

‘Absolutely stoked’

The American linguist April Baker-Bell has written about the way Black language is often appropriated, at the same time as being derided and banned as language suitable for educational contexts. Here’s a quote from a 2021 lecture at the University of Buffalo:

“Let’s not forget: Black language is also the language that continuously gets appropriated and exploited…There are so many examples of fashion designers who capitalize on Black language to create market messages to invite consumers to buy their products.  … Let’s not forget the growing number of white Instagrammers and entertainers who are making a (living) off of Black language and culture.”

Students themselves have a huge amount to gain from learning about spoken language. The benefits are both in helping them to understand their own language better, in order to apply their understandings about what is appropriate, when and why, and to recognise the value in their own linguistic repertoire, as well as ways of stretching and developing it in different directions.

But knowledge about spoken language is also of huge value and interest in its own right. It is a key body of knowledge in the study of English Language. Being knowledgeable about spoken language allows students to notice and analyse aspects of language in use and can include aspects such as:

• Key differences between speech and writing
• Debates around spoken standard English
• Hybrid forms such as social media posts, WhatsApp messages, texts
• Sociolinguistics – how speech, including accent, varies according to class, race, geography, gender, age and how it is perceived and valued
• Pragmatics – how context plays a role in meaning-making, how we interpret meaning in subtexts and implicatures
• Conversational features and politeness principles
• Group languages – jargon, specialised or in-group language
• Speech acquisition in children and how that relates to other aspects of language development, including the relationship between first language and second language learning, as well as learning a foreign language.

In the 1970s, when I first started teaching, the EMC produced a publication called Languages for KS3 classrooms. It included classroom activities on pretty much everything on the list above, and more. It was very popular. As a young teacher, I used it myself, as did other members of my department. In the early 2000s we went on to publish Language Works, spurred on by the excitement of the LINC project and its brilliant materials on spoken language. (The transcripts and video of the language of the Bristol Royal Infirmary were a game changer for many teachers and provided them with brilliant CPD about language).

In 2010 the EMC produced a resource for the GCSE Spoken Language controlled assessment, called Investigating Spoken Language. For a brief period, the Engilsh Languge GCSE assessed spoken language, allowing students to choose an aspect to explore, based on solid learning of the kind of things listed above. It was highly popular with students and teachers, alike.

Then in 2018 we published KS3 Language Laboratory, another resource full of lively classroom activities that included teaching serious linguistic knowledge about the spoken word. Sadly, by this time, the Spoken Language controlled assessment had been ditched in the Gove reforms of GCSE and, in a results-driven climate of high accountability, it was no longer the norm for teachers to introduce this kind of language knowledge into KS3. Although the publication has its fans, one couldn’t say that it is being used in the majority of classrooms up and down the country.

I would argue strongly for a reinstatement of spoken language study at GCSE. I hope that would have numerous beneficial effects – brilliant CPD for teachers on spoken language, a trickle-down into KS3 with permission for teachers to work on spoken language with younger students, and a whole host of benefits around teachers’ understanding of attitudes to speech that might influence whole-school thinking about oracy.

Speech is important. Learning about it is important. It’s vital that teachers understand what matters and what is at stake, in teaching students how to talk well, in using talk to support learning and in giving value and respect to students’ voices. For me, these four aspects – learning to talk, learning through talk, talk for social justice and learning about talk – are what oracy should look like in our education system.

Postscript

A good starting-point for teachers wanting to inform themselves more about linguistics and speech is Language Awareness at School: A Practical Guide for Teachers and School Leaders, by Tim Marr and Steve Collins.

They’re also interviewed on the brilliant Lexis podcast here.

Another very useful book is Marcello Giovanelli’s Knowing About Language: Linguistics and the Secondary English Classroom

Finally, Rob Drummond’s excellent recent book about talk, You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak, is full of valuable and interesting ideas and research about linguistic diversity in spoken language and attitudes towards the way we speak.