We’ve been hearing a lot about oracy lately. As a former English teacher who passionately loves the subject, this is really exciting. But I’m a bit worried too.
I’m concerned that focusing on oracy as a separate ‘thing’ will potentially lead to a disconnect with the parts of the curriculum that enable oracy to develop. Rather than being a ‘fourth R’, oracy needs to be woven and taught explicitly throughout the curriculum, not separately to it.
Teaching oracy is really important, but it’s also about a quite complex layering of knowledge and skills. Put simply, pupils can’t speak well without learning to read and write well.
What’s more, pupils can’t speak well without having something to talk confidently about. That means teaching them knowledge.
Lessons where pupils speak and present their ideas, where they debate and learn to constructively disagree are all great in theory. But it falls down in practice if they are not equipped with the knowledge to do so well and with confidence.
Social confidence is a big thing here – particularly for disadvantaged pupils – and it doesn’t happen by accident. (There’s also a link here between the kinds of co-curricular opportunities we offer to our young people, but that’s a whole other topic.)
We need to be really clear about the links between reading, writing and oracy. Pupils can’t express complex ideas verbally without being able to control the grammatical structures to do so. They also need the vocabulary to articulate their thoughts. This means teaching reading and writing.
Of course, talking can help with this. Often, speaking is an important part of learning a new word or grammatical structure; discussion can be a great way of engaging with an idea in a text.
The relationship is symbiotic in many ways. When we get better at writing, we get better at talking. When we get better at talking, we get better at writing. Ditto reading, and so this beautiful virtual circle keeps spinning.
We’re not ‘done’ with reading yet
I have seen talk used extremely well as part of explicit vocabulary teaching. Saying a word out loud and practising both pronunciation and usage in a sentence helps pupils to remember it and also gives them confidence to use it.
I have seen wonderful classroom debates where pupils discuss and argue constructively about challenging ideas, concepts and tensions, being able to do so because they have in-depth knowledge of subject content.
As an English teacher, this particularly comes alive in relation to literary texts. Pupils can debate the rights and wrongs of Lady Macbeth’s actions, not just because they are being offered the opportunity to argue their case and practise the social norms of turn-taking and how to challenge a different perspective, but because they have a strong understanding of the social and historical context of the play and the role of women in society.
Pupils can give confident presentations about the points Dickens might be trying to make about life in Victorian England because they have a deep knowledge of both the context he was writing in and the different literary devices he uses to convey these ideas.
They are able to express ideas of greater complexity because they have learned the grammatical structures that enable them to convey nuance. The important links between reading, writing, knowledge and talk are so clear when you see this in the classroom.
Reading has come more sharply into focus in recent years. And rightly so. Teaching our young people to read comes second only to keeping them safe. Still, far too many children leave schools unable to read well. We’re not ‘done’ with reading yet (if we are ever ‘done’ with anything in education).
I believe passionately in social justice and I think that our young people deserve to be able to choose to influence society, not just access it. So I fully support a greater focus on oracy, not least because of its other important links with developing personal identity and belonging.
But we need to get it right. And to do that, we need to get reading right first.
Andrew Wilkinson, one of the oracy pioneers of the 1970s, saw talk as related to reading and writing because it was a way of learning. It was language spoken rather than written: a conversational mode of communal thinking.
I hope this article is not an attempt to return to a knowledge-based curriculum. Of course knowledge is important but it has never been more easily acquired. The use of knowledge is just as important, skills in literacy, numeracy and practice are the bedrock of learning. My in-school experience as a teacher and a headteacher has been principally in schools is socially challenged areas where there is often not a rich background of literacy and oracy, if we don’t nurture that in school, pupils in such areas become further disadvantaged.
This article states that “knowledge must be taught”
Correction – “knowledge must be gained (learned)”
When I was a teacher the distinction between teaching and learning was an important one already. As a home educating family of three children living under a child led learning philosophy… Well, it becomes so obvious that the original statement jars and sounds incredibly arrogant I’m afraid. I assume the best of intentions and understand the attitude particularly in a school context. I’m not your normal audience!
Enjoyed the content, agree with the danger of splitting out yet another subject. The impact and issues around the subjectification of knowledge are well documented.
I think the danger is in seeing oracy (or perhaps better if we use e.g. Robin Alexander’s ‘dialogic learning’, which is the sense of oracy that the Oracy Education Commission (OEC) are clearly intending) as ‘one of a four’, as opposed to the fundamental foundation, on which all the others are built.
Oracy as ‘learning to talk and learning through talking’ is, in fact, how we all develop knowledge and understanding of everything. It is not ‘another subject’ or something that could be developed ‘at the expense’ of literacy; it encompasses all subjects (each with its own ground rules and expectations for talk – or, disciplinary oracy) and enriches (disciplinary) literacy and (disciplinary) thinking in each of them. The renewed focus on oracy as a tool to address the shadow of disadvantage is welcome but its focus in the curriculum has been long overdue and should be threaded all the way through every domain and topic (rather than being a lonely ‘Speaking and listening’ paragraph somewhere near the start of each subject’s programme of study).
While we are on the topic, arithmetic (notionally, the third of the original ‘Rs’) does not belong with oracy, reading or writing. As John Hodgson states in the first comment above, reading, writing and oracy are ‘ways of learning’; ‘rithmetic is not. Arithmetic and mathematics are often (wrongly) conflated and were used interchangeably in the OEC’s report but even if mathematics is meant, it still does not belong with reading, writing and oracy. If anything does, it is reasoning (an actual ‘R’!), which is indeed a way of learning, and, like reading and writing, is also underpinned by oracy.
Mathematical reasoning is a specific, disciplinary type of reasoning (just as mathematics is a specific discipline, not a ‘way of learning’) but the very reason mathematics was so valued in ancient times and has persisted as a core subject, is that these mathematical ways of thinking are fruitful in making sense of ideas (so learning!), in solving problems and in verifying and justifying the solutions to those problems.
So let’s make oracy the one ‘O’ that underpins and enhances the (correct) three ‘Rs’!