The need to teach oracy skills is increasingly being recognised. Dr Neil Mercer and Dr Lyn Dawes consider how schools can deliver the two distinct strands of this work – ‘learning how to talk’ and ‘learning through talk’
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The skills of speaking and listening (oracy for short) might seem to come naturally to young people. When they first arrive at school, we expect them to be ready to speak and listen.

But how well can each child speak and listen? And by the time they reach secondary school, what oracy skills have they acquired in their young lives? What differences are there among them? Students are never the same for any set of skills – and a new class of year 7s might arrive with very different “oracy profiles”.

And what exactly are the skills teachers hope to rely on in their students – can we identify “listening skills” and “speaking skills”? How will these enable students to make the most of their education?

If young people lack certain listening skills and speaking skills – should we expect them to just pick them up? We don’t expect that with literacy or numeracy skills. Few children catch on to spelling, long division, or adjectival clauses without a bit of input. With spoken language, if we just cross our fingers and leave them to it what will become of them?

We can see what becomes of them in the unhappy results of education for large groups of children from year 1 onwards. They may be bright as buttons, but a lack of some oracy skills can affect their entire school experience and have an impact on their academic results right through to higher education.

However, we now know that there are ways to teach young people how to use spoken language effectively. Also, classroom-based research has shown clearly how teachers can engage their students, of all ages, most productively in dialogue, talking to them in ways that help them to think and ask questions and so achieve the best “learning outcomes”.

Students learn better when they know how to listen (Dawes, 2020), how to speak, and how to be actively involved in classroom discussion.

“That’s obvious!” you will say. Every teacher knows this to be true. But there is still some resistance to the idea that we should teach listening and speaking, never mind assess such skills; and there are dire predictions of anarchy in the classroom if students are given a voice.

Silence in class will always have its champions, and sometimes sitting quietly and listening attentively is just what learners need to do. But good teachers have a range of teaching styles in their repertoire. They do not only engage all of their listeners, they also elicit active responses from them.

There has been a remarkable and welcome growth of interest in oracy in recent years. Having been overshadowed by literacy and numeracy for so long, it is important that as oracy comes under the spotlight, we have a shared understanding of what exactly it is.

Andrew Wilkinson, who invented the term, defined it as “the ability to use the oral skills of speaking and listening”, which is still essentially fine (Wilkinson, 1965).

When considering the relevance of oracy for what goes on in schools, it is also useful to distinguish between two aspects of it – “learning how to talk” and “learning through talk”.

 

Learning how to talk

Research in children’s homes has shown that their early experience of talk can vary quite dramatically, in both quantity and quality (McGillion et al, 2017; see also Moore, 2024).

Unless schools do something to support those who require it, their early experience can seriously affect their educational attainment right through secondary school and their life chances in general.

Children learn how to use talk effectively through lived experience, through their interactions with various people. As the Russian scholar Bakhtin put it, they don’t learn words from dictionaries – they take them from other people’s mouths.

For many children, their experience of talk is not extensive enough for them to develop a broad repertoire of communication skills; for others, language acquisition is delayed for a variety of reasons.

For many secondary students, being asked to present their ideas clearly to a class or take part in a reasoned discussion to solve a problem may be quite novel events; and they may not have learned the skills to do so. In fact, most young people will benefit from what we can call “oracy education”.

British “public schools”, which educated many members of the current UK government, of course place great emphasis on developing students’ confident and effective use of spoken language, especially for public speaking.

But state schools have not normally provided oracy education. For the sake of social equality, with all its implications, future governments must ensure that all schools teach children the spoken language skills that they need for educational progress, for work, and for active participation in life in general.

Researchers, working closely with teachers, have shown that there are very effective ways of teaching children how to engage in productive discussions (Mercer & Mannion, 2018). For example, group-work becomes more equitable, reasoned, and productive if students are first asked to consider what they think makes discussions more or less effective and then to agree with their teacher a suitable set of “ground rules” for how they will conduct their discussions (see Mannion, 2020, for a discussion about talk rules).

Unproductive talk in groups is often the outcome of students using inappropriate ground rules – for example following unspoken rules such as “keep your best ideas to yourself” rather than a collaborative rule such as “we share any useful information”.

When groups follow appropriate ground rules which help them to establish good discussions, research shows how they are more likely to find robust, creative solutions to problems. They learn how to use talking together to get things done – not just to interact but to “interthink” (Littleton & Mercer, 2013).

Our own research has also shown that when students are taught how to use talk to reason effectively together, they become better at reasoning on their own – a magical individual gain that can improve their attainment in maths, science, and other subjects (Mercer, 2019).

Research on what makes talk effective for solving problems in other contexts outside school (such as in creative work and organisational decision-making) suggests that using the right ground rules is just as important there, too.

It is reassuring that oracy is becoming recognised, internationally, as both a potential curriculum subject and an important set of life-skills.

There is a clear interest among teachers in how spoken language skills can be developed and exactly what this means for classroom practice. There is also an increasing recognition by politicians and policy-makers that oracy should figure among the skills that education systems should promote.

 

Learning through talk

Research in both primary and secondary schools supports the value of promoting and managing dialogue in classrooms (Mercer et al, 2019; Alexander, 2020; Higham et al, 2013; Mannion & McCallister, 2020).

The success of doing so depends on teachers’ skills in using and managing talk. During such “dialogic” teaching, teachers raise students’ awareness of talk for learning and create opportunities for classroom discussion. They instruct and inform their students through clear presentations to attentive classes: but they balance this with whole-class discussion in which students are actively involved in making sense of what they are learning. And they strategically orchestrate group-based talk activities to engage students with the new knowledge that they are providing to their classes.

For dialogic teaching to happen, teachers need to be empowered and skilled to use talk effectively; and their students need to be helped to learn how to use spoken language well to pursue their learning.

Recently, two large-scale studies with upper primary classes have provided evidence from the analysis of large sets of classroom data to support a dialogic approach.

Findings from the first study (Howe et al, 2019) were that year 6 pupils whose teachers (a) ensured that many members of their class regularly participated in dialogue, (b) encouraged students to elaborate and question ideas through talk, and (c) enabled children to work well together in groups gained better SATs results in maths and English than the students of teachers whose classrooms were relatively lacking in such features.

The second study (EEF, 2017) showed similar benefits for students’ attainment in year 5 when their teachers were trained to teach in a more “dialogic” way.

 

Final thoughts

We know, then, that both “learning how to talk” and “learning through talk” are important. The former is a curriculum issue; the latter is a pedagogic issue.

Oracy education involves explicitly teaching students how to use talk to get things done. Dialogic teaching, for any subject, involves teachers using the best communicative strategies to impart new knowledge and manage classroom discussion.

Both oracy education and dialogic teaching can be justified by reference to classroom-based research evidence. Both can make all the difference to students’ educational progress and can have far reaching effects for their lives beyond school.

  • Dr Neil Mercer is emeritus professor of education at the University of Cambridge and director of Oracy Cambridge: The Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication. As a psychologist, Dr Mercer’s research has focused on the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities and teachers’ role in that development. 
  • Dr Lyn Dawes is an associate working with Oracy Cambridge delivering workshops for teachers to support their integration of oracy into the curriculum. She is a former teacher of science.

 

Further information & resources 

 

Further best practice from SecEd