As oracy moves rapidly up the educational agenda, we need to be careful not to confuse more classroom talk with better learning.
The current spotlight on oracy is wonderful. After years in which reading, writing and knowledge have understandably dominated many conversations about curriculum and attainment, spoken language is receiving renewed attention. English practitioners the length and breadth of the UK are celebrating the building momentum of meaningful engagement with the spoken word and I count myself among this celebratory number, but I also feel a niggling doubt about the efficacy of the strategies schools will introduce.
The ability to articulate an idea, listen carefully, challenge an argument, explain a line of reasoning and build on someone else's thinking is not a "soft skill", it is fundamental to how we participate in education, work and society, and the renewed Ofsted framework reflects this. Inspectors are now looking at whether pupils are taught to communicate effectively through spoken language, articulate ideas and engage with others through speaking and listening.
The EEF evidence is encouraging. Its Teaching and Learning Toolkit currently gives oral language approaches an average impact of around six months' additional progress, with high-quality evidence sitting behind the strand. Crucially, however, the EEF makes the distinction that the strongest evidence is for purposeful, curriculum-focused dialogue and interaction, rather than simply getting pupils to talk more. This is where I fear tokenism will creep in, and the innumerable benefits of verbal interaction will be a lucky byproduct of ill-conceived strategies that lack the careful consideration required to become meaningful. We must avoid our enthusiasm for oracy inadvertently being reduced to another collection of classroom activities or Sisyphean ‘things’ teacher have to do.
There are plenty of pedagogical strategies to facilitate discussion that we all use on a daily basis, such as think-pair-share, debates, student presentations, discussion protocols and sentence stems to name a few, but none of these in isolation constitute good oracy, and more importantly, none of them necessarily constitutes learning. I’m reminded of the push towards self and peer marking back in the late noughties, or dialogic marking in the 2010s. We all felt pressured into building these into our practice, but it was so often futile because the methodology was flawed or the impact poorly assessed. Students were expected to become experts in self-reflexivity and critical engagement without understanding the nuances of applying a mark scheme or valuing ‘creativity’ in their own and others’ work. With dialogic marking, I can vividly recall one of the most stressful evenings of my life going back through books in readiness for an Ofsted inspection the following day and ensuring I had ‘second marked’ all students’ comments to my initial feedback, most of which ware banal nonsense such as ‘’Thanks miss, I’ll do that next time’’ or ‘’okay’’. If we are introducing strategies that are designed to develop students’ knowledge, skills, confidence, cultural capital, or in this instance, oracy, then the strategies and initiatives we put in place MUST benefit the student and not burden teachers unnecessarily.
We need to be very careful to distinguish between a classroom full of talking and a classroom full of thinking. The former can facilitate the latter, but only if done purposefully and for the right reasons: we are encouraging students to verbalise what they think, to interrogate why they think it, and to engage in developmental dialogue with their peers that ultimately leads to them becoming confident, informed, articulate individuals who actually HAVE something to say. In other words, verbal participation and cognitive engagement are not the same thing. We have a genuine opportunity to create brilliant speakers but this should also go hand in hand with brilliant thinking.
The EEF's evidence makes this point more implicitly, its definition of effective oral language approaches including developing ideas, making connections with prior knowledge, developing vocabulary and developing metacognitive awareness. It also describes dialogue as a tool for developing pupils' understanding, thinking and metacognition. This ambitious conception of classroom talk is something I’ve always tried to facilitate in my lessons, and I implore educators to treat this almost paradigmatic shift towards oracy as more than simply creating opportunities for pupils to speak.
The EEF is clear that effective oral-language approaches are strongest when integrated with the existing curriculum, and specifically highlights the importance of linking vocabulary and oral-language activity to the content pupils are currently studying. This interrogates another false dichotomy: we don't need to choose between knowledge and oracy, we should be transferring knowledge through dialogue and establishing a shared language of learning alongside promoting speaking skills. Knowledge and language are mutually reinforcing and who best to strengthen this relationship than us as practitioners? The more pupils know, the more they have to think and talk about; the more thoughtfully they talk about that knowledge, the more deeply they understand it or question it. If we can get this balance right, the easier it will be to build in purposeful talk in our lessons.
We should avoid discrete ‘oracy lessons’ at all costs. The EEF warns that the breadth of practices being labelled "oracy" creates a risk of superficial and performative approaches. It argues that oral language is most powerful when embedded in purposeful, curriculum-focused teaching rather than treated as a distinct bolt-on (see ‘peer assessment’ and ‘dialogic marking’ above!). We have an annoying habit in education of taking a great idea that has the potential for real impact and turning it into a ‘thing’ instead.
If the current enthusiasm for oracy leads us to create more opportunities for pupils to think, reason, explain, listen, challenge and refine their understanding, it could be genuinely profound, but if we start saying ‘Right kids, it’s oracy time’, I fear we’re doomed to fail and will be doing students a real disservice.
