According to recent Teacher Tapp polling, 56 per cent of teachers feel that oracy should be one of their school’s top priorities for the coming year. With good reason. Voice21’s new impact report explains why schools are increasingly choosing to focus on oracy and if they are not, why they should be.
The report, which draws on survey data from 12,313 staff and 46,636 students in Voice 21 Oracy Schools as well as findings from research projects led by the charity over the past year, illustrates the value and impact of oracy education.
As you might expect, we’ve learnt that oracy teaching is vital in the early years. Communication and language skills provide the foundation for the development of later literacy skills and so explicitly teaching oracy in the early years sets students up for success as they progress through school.
But the benefits don’t stop there.
Oracy boosts reading
Progress in reading is accelerated through high-quality oracy education. In our research project to explore the impact of an oracy-rich approach to vocabulary development, 80 per cent of students met or exceeded expected progress in reading, with one-third of students exceeding expected progress. These findings are consistent with those from other studies, such as an EEF meta-analysis which found oral language interventions had a positive impact on attainment, particularly in reading.
The mechanism by which oracy benefits reading is better understood too. Vocabulary plays a fundamental role in the reading process, both in terms of word recognition and language comprehension. And as Isabelle Beck and colleagues explain in their ground-breaking book, Bringing Words to Life, oral language is the most effective vehicle for learning new words. In oracy-rich classrooms, students have structured opportunities to try out and experiment with new vocabulary in their speech and to hear new language in context, ultimately benefiting their reading.
Supporting transition
Student respondents to our survey told us that oracy education boosts their confidence academically and socially. This is particularly important at transition, when students are adapting to a new social environment and academic challenges.
Oracy education also supports students with their emotional transition into, and development throughout adolescence. Our research demonstrates that students’ perceptions of speaking itself change at transition; anxiety and nervousness increase dramatically in year 7 and rise steadily throughout secondary school. Explicitly teaching students the oracy skills they need to speak effectively in different contexts gives them the confidence they need to speak up in secondary school.
Subject-specificity
Oracy improves outcomes across the curriculum. However, in secondary schools oracy expertise is not evenly distributed across departments. We found that English and humanities teachers are most likely to be ‘definitely’ involved in the development of their school’s oracy provision, while maths and science teachers are least likely to be ‘definitely’ involved.
To realise the benefits of oracy education, schools should embrace oracy in all subjects. As Neil Mercer and Karen Littleton famously said in Dialogue and the development of children’s thinking, “Ways of thinking are embedded in ways of using language.” Teaching students to speak like scientists, mathematicians and historians empowers them to think like specialists.
Oracy can be assessed
Not being able to assess and track student progress continues to be the most cited barrier to a greater focus on oracy in schools. However, our pilot, Comparing Talk established that comparative judgement is a reliable way to assess oracy.
This method of assessment relies on assessors making lots of quick comparisons between videos of student talk rather than ‘marking’ each video in a traditional way against a mark scheme or rubric. As such, it overcomes concerns about the reliability of other approaches while giving teachers and schools the confidence that they can track students’ progress.
Given the obvious benefits of oracy education across subject areas and at all stages of education as highlighted in this report, it is unsurprising that it is a priority for so many teachers. As the evidence base for oracy education and strategies for its implementation strengthen, expect to see oracy as a focus for even more teachers and school leaders, in every type of school.
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