NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty outlines the focus of this year’s NACE R&D Hub on “oracy for high achievement” – exploring the impetus for this, challenges for schools, and approaches being trialled.
This year one of the NACE Research & Development Hubs is examining the theme of ‘oracy for high achievement’. The Hub is exploring the importance of rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse in the context of shared classroom practice. School leaders and teachers participating in the Hub are seeking to improve the value and effectiveness of speaking and listening. They are developing a body of knowledge about provision and pedagogy for more able learners, sharing ideas and practice and contributing to wider research evidence on oracy through their classroom-based enquiries.
Why focus on oracy?
Oracy is one of the most used and most important skills in schools. To be able to speak eloquently and with confidence, to articulate thinking and express an opinion are all essential for success both at school and beyond. Communication is a vital skill for the 21st century from the early years, through formal education, to employment. It embraces skills for relationship building, resolving conflict, thinking and learning, and social interaction. Oral language is the medium through which children communicate formally and informally in classroom contexts and the cornerstone of thinking and learning. The NACE publication Making Space for Able Learners found that “central to most classroom practice is the quality of communication and the use of talk and language to develop thinking, knowledge and understanding” (NACE, 2020, p.38).
Oracy is very much at the heart of classroom practice: modern classroom environments resound to the sound of students talking: as a whole class, in group discussions and in partner conversations. Teachers explaining, demonstrating, instructing and coaching all involve the skills of oracy. Planned purposeful classroom talk supports learning in and across all subject areas, encouraging students to:
- Analyse and solve problems
- Receive, act and build upon answers
- Think critically
- Speculate and imagine
- Explore and evaluate ideas
Dialogic teaching’ is highly influential in oracy-rich classrooms (Alexander, 2004). It uses the power of classroom talk to challenge and stretch students. Through dialogue, teachers can gauge students’ perspectives, engage with their ideas and help them overcome misunderstandings. Exploratory talk is a powerful context for classroom talk, providing students with opportunities to share opinions and engage with peers (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). It is not just conversational talk, but talk for learning. Given the importance and prevalence of classroom talk, it would be easy to assume that oracy receives high status in the curriculum, but its promotion is not without obstacles to overcome.
Challenges for schools in developing oracy skills
Covid-19 has impacted upon students’ oracy. A report from the children’s communication charity I CAN estimated that more than 1.5 million UK young people risk being left behind in their language development as a result of lost learning in the Covid-19 period (read more here). The Charity reported that the majority of teachers were worried about young people being able to catch up with their speaking and understanding as a result of the pandemic (I CAN, 2021).
With origins going back to the 1960s, the term oracy was introduced as a response to the high priority placed on literacy in the curriculum of the time. Rien ne change, with the current emphasis remaining exactly so. Literacy skills, i.e. reading and writing, continue to dominate the curriculum. Oracy extends vocabulary and directly helps with learning to read. The educationalist James Nimmo Britton famously said that “good literacy floats on a sea of talk” and recognised that oracy is the foundation for literacy.
Teachers do place value on oracy. In a 2016 survey by Millard and Menzies of 900 teachers across the sector, over 50% said they model the sorts of spoken language they expect of their students, they do set expectations high, and they initiate pair or group activities in many lessons. They also highlighted the social and emotional benefits of oracy and suggested it has untapped potential to support pupils’ employability – but reported that provision is often patchy and that CPD was sparse or even non-existent.
Another challenge is that oracy is mentioned infrequently in inspection reports. An analysis of reports of over 3,000 schools on the Ofsted database, undertaken by the Centre for Education and Youth in 2021, found that when taken in the context of all school inspections taking place each year, oracy featured in only 8% of reports.
The issue of how oracy is assessed is a further challenge. Assessment profoundly influences student learning. Changes to assessment requirements now provide schools with new freedoms to ensure their assessment systems support pupils to achieve challenging outcomes. Despite useful frameworks to assess oracy such as the toolkit from the organisation Voice 21, there is no accepted system for the assessment of oracy.
What are NACE R&D Hub participants doing to develop oracy in their schools?
The challenges outlined above make the work of participants in the Hub of real importance. With a focus on ‘oracy for high achievement’, the Hub is supporting teachers and leaders to delve deeper into oracy practices in their classrooms. The Hub supports small-scale projects through which they can evidence the impact of change and evaluate their practice. Activities are trialled over a short period of time so that their true impact can be observed in school and even replicated in other schools.
The participants are now engaged in a variety of enquiry-based projects in their classrooms and schools. These include:
- Use of the Harkness Discussion method to enable more able students to exhibit greater depth of understanding, complexity of response and analytical skills within cognitively challenging learning;
- Explicit teaching of oracy skills to improve independent discussion in science and history lessons;
- Introduction of hot-seating to improve students’ ability to ask valuable questions;
- Choice in oral tasks to improve the quality of students’ analytical skills;
- Oracy structures in collaborative learning to challenge more able students’ deeper learning and analysis;
- Better reasoning using oracy skills in small group discussion activities;
- Interventions in drama to improve the quality of classroom discussion.
Share your experience
We are seeking NACE member schools to share their experiences of effective oracy practices, including new initiatives and well-established practices. You may feel that some of the examples above are similar to practices in your own school, or you may have well-developed models of oracy teaching and learning that would be of interest to others. To share your experience, simply contact us, considering the following questions:
- How can we implement effective oracy strategies without dramatically increasing teacher workload?
- How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
- What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners?
- How can we implicitly teach pupils to justify and expand their ideas and make clear opportunities to develop their understanding through talk and deepen their understanding?
- How do we evidence challenge for oracy within lessons?
Teachers should develop students’ spoken language, reading, writing and vocabulary as integral aspects of the teaching of every subject. Every teacher is a teacher of oracy. The report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group inquiry into oracy in schools concluded that there was an indisputable case for oracy as an integral aspect of education. This adds to a growing and now considerable body of evidence to celebrate the place that oracy has in our schools and in our society. Oracy is in a unique place to support the learning and development of more able pupils in schools and the time to give oracy its due is now.
References
- Alexander, R. J. (2004) Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk. York, UK: Dialogos.
- Britton, J. (1970) Language and learning. London: Allen Lane. [2nd ed., 1992, Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann].
- I CAN (2021) Speaking Up for the Covid Generation. London: I CAN Charity.
- Lowe, H. & McCarthy, A. (2020) Making Space for Able Learners. Didcot, Oxford: NACE.
- Mercer, N. &. Dawes., L. (2008) The Value of Exploratory Talk. In Exploring Talk in School, edited by N. Mercer and S. Hodgkinson, pp. 55–71. London: Sage.
- Millard, W. & Menzies, L. (2016) The State of Speaking in Our Schools. London: Voice 21/LKMco.
- Millard, W., Menzies, L. & Stewart, G. (2021) Oracy after the pandemic: what Ofsted, teachers and young people think about oracy. Centre for Education & Youth/University of Oxford.
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