Placing oracy at the heart of vocabulary teaching and learning accelerates progress in reading, builds students’ confidence to use their voices in school, and enhances teachers’ understanding and delivery of oracy education.
These were the principle findings of Voicing Vocabulary – a project designed to explore the opportunities an oracy-rich approach creates to build and deepen students’ academic vocabulary at the crucial key stage 2 to 3 transition point.
Several disruptive factors coincide at this age affecting perceptions of self and academic attainment (Jindal-Snape et al, 2020). There is a notable linguistic challenge that many students experience as they move into year 7. To an extent, this is connected to an increase in both the quantity and complexity of disciplinary language across the curriculum (Deignan et al, 2022).
Through the project, we wanted to explore if oracy education could address this challenge by creating frequent and purposeful opportunities for students to encounter, experiment with, and showcase newly learned language through talk. In doing so, we identified five active ingredients of an oracy-centred approach to vocabulary development.
A SecEd best practice guide to teaching oracy in schools
This article is among 18 best practice, advice-driven pieces published in SecEd's recent free-to-download supplement focused on the teaching of oracy skills. The practical 21-page supplement takes a deep dive into everything that oracy education entails, with lots of ideas, advice, lessons learned, and school case studies. Download your free pdf via www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/downloads/a-seced-best-practice-guide-to-teaching-oracy-in-schools
1, Shared understanding
A shared understanding of oracy supports teachers and students to value the role of talk in learning processes, demystifying what constitutes effective classroom talk. Teachers can familiarise themselves with the Oracy Framework (Voice 21 & Oracy Cambridge, 2015) and the Oracy Benchmarks (Voice 21, 2019) – which are introduced by my colleague Amy Gaunt in this article also from the SecEd Oracy supplement.
2, Prioritise vocabulary
In a busy curriculum, knowing which words to teach explicitly is key. Selecting words to prioritise across the curriculum is difficult to do in isolation and may well change year-to-year. By placing vocabulary at the heart of planning processes, schools can instigate more discussion around which words to teach and when, helping teachers to make judicious choices about language.
In the Voicing Vocabulary project, participants found that:
- Teaching fewer words in more depth leads to better retention and more accurate application of new language.
- A vocabulary-first approach ensures that thinking about key words doesn’t become an add-on and instead sits at the heart of topic or unit planning.
- Collaborating with subject colleagues and across departments to prioritise vocabulary creates better curriculum cohesion and more opportunities for students to encounter academic language in a range of contexts.
3, Context is key
Contextualise new vocabulary through talk. The progression from vocabulary input (hearing or seeing new language) to output (producing new language) is a process that takes time as new words are gradually embedded into students’ productive vocabulary (Beck et al, 2013).
Including multiple “low-stakes” activities during the input phase creates engaging opportunities for learning and builds confidence and retention of new language. Teachers on the project:
- Created more space for exploratory talk as opposed to presentational talk (Barnes, 1976) and built students’ confidence to express their early thinking by creating a positive culture of talk in the classroom.
- Used scaffolds (discussion guidelines, sentence starters, groupings, discussion roles) where appropriate to support experimentation with new vocabulary.
4, Foster mastery
Use oracy to monitor ownership of new vocabulary. Talk is also an effective vehicle for assessing students’ mastery of vocabulary.
Once familiarity with new language has been established (through input activities) teachers can create meaningful oracy-centred contexts for language production. Grounding these activities in talk allows students to demonstrate their ownership of new vocabulary and enables teachers to judge how effectively this vocabulary has been learned. Teachers can do this by:
- Selecting meaningful contexts for the application of new language that situate subject-specific vocabulary in authentic disciplinary scenarios – i.e. giving an expert talk in science, demonstrating a proof in maths, or delivering a weather report in French.
- Teaching the oracy skills required for more presentational oracy experiences and equipping students to engage in different modes of classroom talk.
5, Collaborate cross-phase
In the project schools, opportunities for teachers to work with their cross-phase colleagues enhanced teacher practice in both primary and secondary settings. We encourage schools to:
Establish connections between subject leads in primary and teachers in secondary to identify the vocabulary students have been introduced to at key stage 2 and will need to master at key stage 3 – particularly helpful in subjects where there is a dramatic increase in the volume and intricacy of new vocabulary.
Identify where existing transition activities could be enhanced by an oracy-rich approach and where students might encounter some of the cross-curricular vocabulary they will need to access the key stage 3 curriculum.
Final thoughts
Four years since we launched Voicing Vocabulary, we continue to see the impact of an oracy-centred approach to vocabulary teaching in Voice 21 Oracy Schools. You can read more about the project and see the recommendations in action in the Voicing Vocabulary report (Voice 21, 2023).
- Kathleen McBride is senior learning and innovation lead at Voice 21, a national oracy education charity. Visit https://voice21.org/
Further information & resources
- Barnes: From communication to curriculum, Penguin Education, 1976.
- Beck, McKeown & Kucan: Bringing Words to Life: Robust vocabulary instruction, Guildford Press, 2013.
- Deignan, Candarli & Oxley: The Linguistic Challenge of the Transition to Secondary School, Routledge, 2022.
- Jindal-Snape et al: Systematic literature review of primary-secondary transitions: International research, Review of Education (8), BERA, 2020.
- Voice 21: The Oracy Benchmarks, 2019: https://voice21.org/oracy-benchmarks
- Voice 21: Voicing Vocabulary: Establishing and evaluating an oracy-centred approach to vocabulary development, 2023: https://buff.ly/3DaxKHy
- Voice 21 & Oracy Cambridge: The Oracy Framework, 2015: https://buff.ly/4gY6Al5