The term “oracy” was first coined in the 1960s by academic Andrew Wilkinson to emphasise that, just like literacy and numeracy, speaking skills can and should be taught at school.
According to the research, good spoken language skills lead to better academic outcomes, greater confidence, and enhanced employability (see EEF, 2021; Gascoigne & Gross, 2017).
Yet, up to 75% of children who experience persistent poverty start school “below average” in terms of language development (Gascoigne & Gross, 2017).
At Voice 21, we believe that every child should have access to a high-quality oracy education which equips them with the oracy skills they need to succeed in school and in life. But how, with the pressure of an increasingly crowded, content-heavy curriculum, can you find the time to teach oracy explicitly?
Teaching oracy does not have to be a time-consuming add-on. In fact, with a few tweaks to your teaching, you can improve the quality of the talk that is already happening in your classroom and develop your students’ oracy.
Set and share your expectations for oracy
You will have different expectations for your students’ oracy depending on whether they are engaging in paired or group discussion, responding to a question, or presenting their work to the class.
For example, when speaking to a partner you might expect your students to turn to face each other and respond to or probe each other’s points. When giving a presentation, you may encourage them to project their voice and adjust their language according to the needs of the audience.
Your students will not necessarily know what makes effective talk in each context and so it is a good idea to explicitly share your expectations. A simple verbal reminder about what makes effective partner talk, for example, can make a marked difference to the quality of talk in this context.
Discussion guidelines
When it comes to group discussion, it is useful to develop a set of “discussion guidelines” to use with your students. These are effectively a set of success criteria for effective discussion. These could include:
- Always respect each other’s ideas
- Invite others to contribute
- Demonstrate active listening
- Be prepared to change your mind
- Try to come to a shared agreement
Whatever guidelines you agree with your students, revisit them before every discussion – your students should know them by heart!
You can then use them as a basis for self-reflection and peer feedback, developing student awareness of the hallmarks of effective talk in each context and improving the quality of group discussion in your classroom. Voice 21 has a free discussion guidelines poster available to download (see further information).
The Oracy Framework
The Oracy Framework, developed by Voice 21 and Oracy Cambridge, is a useful tool to understand what makes good talk in different contexts. It breaks the skills within oracy down into four distinct but interlinked strands:
- Physical
- Linguistic
- Cognitive
- Social/emotional
The physical strand encompasses the physical elements of speaking and listening: your body language, gestures, eye contact, facial expressions, and how you vary the tone, pitch, pace, and volume of your voice.
The linguistic strand relates to the words we choose and how we bring these together through speech.
The cognitive strand describes the thought processes that underpin speaking and listening.
And the social/emotional strand relates to our confidence and interactions with others: how we conduct ourselves within a group, present ourselves to an audience, and listen effectively to others.
When asking your students to complete an oral outcome, such as presenting the findings of an experiment, performing a piece of poetry, giving an explanation, or interviewing a guest, it is worth using the Oracy Framework to identify a set of success criteria.
When performing a piece of poetry you might focus on the physical aspects of oracy, such as tone, pitch, pace, and volume, for example. And when giving an explanation, you could focus on the cognitive aspects of talk such as structure and choice of content.
Sometimes it is enough to simply share these expectations with students, raising their awareness of the hallmarks of effective talk in different contexts, and other times you will need to explicitly teach these skills.
Provide scaffolds for oracy
Once you have set and shared your expectations for oracy in different contexts, consider providing scaffolds to support your students to achieve a higher standard of oracy than they could on their own.
Scaffolds for oracy can take many forms and will vary depending on what type of talk you want your students to engage in. Once your students have mastered a particular skill, do not forget to remove or modify the scaffolding to enable them to practise the skill independently or reach an even higher standard of oracy.
Turn-taking: When first providing your students with more opportunities for peer discussion, some of them may struggle with turn-taking. By providing a scaffold for turn-taking you can support students to run discussions independently. A protocol, such as “thumbs in”, when students put a thumb up to indicate that they would like to speak, provides a clear system for the student currently speaking to choose who speaks next. You might like to download Voice 21’s Choose Your Protocol poster (see further information).
Talk tokens: If, when engaging in group discussion, some students tend to dominate while others stay quiet, create a more equal balance of talk using a scaffold such as talk tokens. These are counters or tokens, and they visually represent contributions to a discussion. When a student contributes to a discussion, they “spend” a token. Issue each student with a set number of tokens to encourage them to think carefully about each contribution they make. Once they have run out of tokens, they cannot add anything else to the discussion!
Talk tactics: Talk tactics are an excellent scaffold for group discussion. They set out the specific ways that students can interact “tactically” with each other’s ideas, raising the quality of talk and discussion. Each tactic breaks down a different skill set out in the cognitive strand of the Oracy Framework.
In a rich discussion, students will strategically deploy several different tactics, depending on the content and direction of the discussion, rather than sticking to just one. Download our Student Talk Tactics resource (see further information).
Sentence stems: Sentence stems are probably the simplest and most effective scaffold for talk. Their power comes from their ability to shape thinking as well as speaking. For example, when providing a sentence stem to support students to hypothesise in maths, you prompt them to think like a mathematician. Consider what type of talk (to explain, to instruct, to negotiate, to problem-solve) is most useful in your subject and then develop a set of sentence stems to support your students to engage effectively in this type of talk.
Praise students’ oracy
One of simplest ways to raise your students' understanding and awareness of oracy and improve their skills is to praise students consistently and liberally for their oracy.
This works well on two levels. It brings oracy skills to life as you praise students for embodying them. It also motivates them to deploy these skills. In this way it is a self-reinforcing cycle.
When praising students’ oracy, it is easy to fall back on comments about their gestures or the volume of their voice, as these tend to be the most readily identifiable features of talk.
To ensure you are praising all the elements that make up good talk, give oracy-specific praise across all four strands of the Oracy Framework. For example, “great use of specialist vocabulary – you really sounded like an expert” in the linguistic strand, or “well done for inviting someone into the discussion” in the social/emotional strand.
- Amy Gaunt is director of learning and impact at Voice 21, a national charity which works to transform the learning and life chances of young people through talk. Voice 21 supports a network of Oracy Schools. Amy is the co-author of Transform Teaching & Learning through Talk: The Oracy Imperative. Visit https://voice21.org/ and follow @voice21oracy
Further information & resources
- EEF: Oral language interventions, July 2021: http://bit.ly/3zW7QCo
- Gascoigne & Gross: Talking about a generation, I CAN & The Communication Trust, 2017: https://bit.ly/3KzYUr3
- Voice 21: The Oracy Framework: https://bit.ly/3UArFZt
- Voice 21: Discussion Guidelines: https://bit.ly/41gpc8y
- Voice 21: Choose Your Protocol: https://bit.ly/3KxEQp9
- Voice 21: Student Talk Tactics: https://bit.ly/3UC66aH