Oracy: We Need to Talk

Introduction to Poetry

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0:52Hello. A few years ago, I was asked to do a poetry workshop with some teenage students in East London. My brief was simply to introduce a poem, not by me, to the students. The poem I brought in was by the African-American poet Langston Hughes called I Too, though some call it I Too Sing America. It's a poem told in the voice of a man who calls himself the Darker Brother. He tells how when company comes, he's sent to eat in the kitchen. Then he tells us that tomorrow, when company comes, he'll be at the table.

1:25This time, he says, no one will dare to send him to the kitchen. Anyway, he says, they'll see how beautiful he is and be ashamed. And then comes the last line, I too am America. Perhaps you know the poem. I guess that this group of teenagers, aged about 14, didn't. Now, one way to approach this situation is for the most knowledgeable person in the room, me, to tell the students what the poem is about. And I could do that by giving a short lecture, illustrated by biographical details about Langston Hughes,

2:00the development of civil rights in the US from slavery times through to the present day, and even which famous poem that this poem seems to be replying to. Instead, I worked to a different principle, based on the idea of what's been called dialogic learning, learning through dialogue or conversation. What I did was give the students two trigger questions. The first was, is there anything in this poem that reminds you of anything that has ever happened to you or someone you know?

2:31They immediately started talking about how it reminded them of when their parents have visitors over, they're sent off somewhere to eat fish fingers, while their parents and their friends ate posh food. They got quite indignant about this. The second question I gave them to discuss was, is there anything in this poem that reminds you of anything else you've ever read or seen on TV or in a movie or in a song? They chatted about several things until one of them stood up and announced to the others, I've got this, I know what this is, this is Martin Luther King.

3:06I have a dream, that's what this is about. The students then went back to the poem and talked intensely about why this lad had said that. What happened there is an example of what has come to be called oracy. Oracy, I've always understood it to mean talk, with the added element of it taking place within education.

Defining Oracy

3:27But I'll clear that up in just a moment with my guest. She is Amy Gaunt, a former primary school teacher who now works at the oracy education charity Voice 21. Hello, Amy. Hello. Let's begin with the word itself. How do you define that word oracy? So at Voice 21, we define oracy as articulating ideas, developing understanding and engaging with others through speaking, listening and communication. In practice, in the classroom, that means that we are creating opportunities for children to learn to talk, but also to learn through talk.

3:59So learning through talk is basically what you described there in that episode of teaching that you described. So creating opportunities for children to develop their knowledge, their understanding through talk, but making sure that we're explicitly teaching them the oracy skills they need to do that really effectively. And when was the word coined? Because it's fairly new, isn't it? Yes. It's what we call a neologism, which essentially means that it's a made up word. And it was made up by someone called Andrew Wilkinson, who was an academic and an education researcher in 1965, because he wanted to raise the profile of spoken language and listening by creating this sort of equivalence with literacy and numeracy.

4:39And within schools, we have to say it's within education. I mean, we're all walking around talking, but we're not really doing oracy, are we? Yes, exactly. It's about how we develop children speaking, listening and communication skills in school, just like we develop their literacy skills and their numeracy skills. So do you think that you can teach oracy? Yes, I do. So, all right, well, let's explore it. How? So it's both kind of how we teach, but also what we teach.

5:09So if we're thinking about that idea of learning to talk, so what we teach, I think we can teach oracy skills. You know, we don't innately know how to give a good presentation. We don't innately know how to contribute really effectively to a discussion. So I think you can teach those things in school. Right. We'll come back to some of that in a minute.

Oracy in Government

5:27But we ought to say first, one of the reasons we're talking about this now is because it's been mentioned by people in government, hasn't it? So can you remind us of what's been said or written about oracy in some of the recent government pronouncements? Yeah. So last year there was what was called a curriculum and assessment review, which essentially was a group of people taking a step back and looking at the curriculum and the assessment system and working out how effectively it's preparing children and young people for life. And one of the aspects of education that they looked at as part of that was how well the curriculum is developing children's speaking, listening and communication skills.

6:06And when the final report came out last year, essentially it said oracy is really, really important and we need to do more to develop it in schools. Schools need more guidance and support to develop children's oracy skills. Just take me to a classroom. As a teacher, they have in front of them the idea that today is oracy or this session just after lunch is going to be oracy. What might that teacher be doing? What were you doing when you were teaching oracy? So I don't know that it would have been a specific session that I said to students, right, this is oracy. A lot of it was about all of the teaching that we were doing.

6:38So it might have been, for example, in the primary classroom, we do a lot of getting children to turn and talk to their partner and discuss something. And then instead of sort of saying to children, you know, turn and talk to your partner and then kind of hoping for the best, actually making sure that we're teaching children how to do that really effectively. So, you know, making sure that you're facing your partner, that you're listening to them, that you're responding to what they're saying rather than just kind of waiting to give your response and say what you think about something. Teaching people to listen, it's quite difficult thing to teach, isn't it?

7:08Because, you know, you might be bursting. Let's say we were talking about the water I've got in front of the table and you want to tell your story and I want to tell my story. I want to dive in. So how do you say to a young child, let's say seven or eight, or for that matter, like the teenagers that I was working with, hold your horses, listen. How would you do it? I think it's about your expectations that you set in the classroom. So you might be that you're getting children to talk to a partner and then you might say, can you tell me what your partner said instead of just what you thought? So you're building in that expectation they've had to listen and then they're having to summarise what someone else has said and report that back to you.

7:43So there's lots of small kind of tweaks that you can make to everyday classroom practice to really sort of centre listening.

Teaching Oracy

7:51Have you got some other examples from the classroom? Yes, we'd also think about oracy in different subjects. So it might be that in maths you're asking children to work together to solve a problem. But you're also making sure that you're teaching them the oracy skills they need to do that really effectively. So it could be how to justify answers, how to ask someone for an example to explain their points. And we also thought about what Douglas Barnes, who is an academic, termed presentational talk. So opportunities for children to speak to different audiences for different purposes.

8:21So that might have been presenting the findings of a science experiment to the class or performing a poem or a story to an audience of parents or younger children. And we thought about it not just in the classroom as well. So we thought about it beyond the classroom as well. So we thought about building oracy into the wider life of the school. So we flipped the format of assemblies. So instead of having children sort of sitting in rows, listening to the headteacher at the front, getting children sitting in circles, discussing big kind of questions and topics together.

8:51And then some children standing up and presenting their thinking to the rest of the school as well. And then what about something that I've heard people getting agitated about, which is extending the way in which children speak? I was in a situation just this week, and somebody told me that children are coming into schools, the way she expressed it was, with hardly any language, hardly any stories, hardly any ability to narrativise. In other words, to tell a story about their experience.

9:24And she felt that this was newish. But genuinely, if she said, what did you do over the weekend to a four or five-year-old, there was nothing forthcoming. How do you do that? How do you extend answers? So I think a lot of it's about the culture that you set in the classroom. So if you're really centring oracy in the classroom, making sure that you're creating loads of extended opportunities for children to engage in, you know, discussion, debate. And I guess just building really language-rich classrooms where your children come in after the weekend, you're asking them what they did, you're feeding them new language, you're giving them opportunities to kind of try out and explore that new language through talk.

10:03Well, let's listen to Tia. Now, she's experienced being taught oracy at school, so let's have a listen to her and see what she made of those sessions. My name is Tia, and I went to a school that taught oracy. One lesson I remember was in Year 10 English. We were given a photo of a busy high street and asked to imagine the story behind it. After finishing that assignment, instead of just moving on, we talked about it and verbally mind-mapped the scene as a class. We described our senses, what we could see, what we might hear.

10:34We practiced zooming in and out on the people in the picture. Who were they? Where were they going? Why were they there? Listening to everyone else's ideas helped me realise that there isn't just one way to view the world. Many stories could exist in a single moment. Orocy changed me. It gave me permission to think creatively, question assumptions, and build on other people's perspectives. Talking it through helped me understand where my own thinking and writing could go further. Learning in that way helped me develop the confidence to explore ideas deeply and express them clearly.

11:08Those skills stayed with me ever since. I'm now studying social science and that journey has recently led to an offer to study PBS at the University of Cambridge. We just heard there from Tia that she's going to use it at university. She talked about she's going to study PBS at Cambridge and the PBS is psychology and behaviour science. So what about the world of work? So I guess there's something instinctive, isn't there, that we know that Orocy skills are really important in the world of work. They're important to kind of get jobs.

11:38We know you need Orocy skills to perform well at interview, but also when you have a job, they're important. Most jobs involve talking to people. And I think in the age of AI, they're even more important. So we often talk about these human skills like Orocy, which are going to be the most difficult to automate and which will have the greatest currency in this AI driven world that we're soon to be living in. And all the soft skills to do with, well, I don't know, being nice, cooperating and not being somebody horrible.

12:08I mean, that's pretty important as well, isn't it? Yeah, we often talk about the link between Orocy and well-being as well, that talk is at the heart of how we kind of build and sustain relationships. And that's important, obviously, in the workplace, but also it's just a really important skill to have in life.

Critiques of Oracy

12:23Just a bit. Yeah. Now, we should say that there are some people who think that this isn't really appropriate or even I've heard that it's actually a waste of valuable school time. Now, the argument goes, I think, that our job in schools, people like you and sometimes me, is to impart knowledge, the way they put it, as fast and as efficiently as possible. And what's going to happen then is that's going to free up children's minds. This is the argument I've heard so that they can think using the knowledge that's been imparted to them.

12:55That's the theory. So they say there isn't time for this chat. They sometimes diminish it like that. And what's more, it's often inconsequential or plain wrong. Someone might pick up, for example, that those children responding to Langston Hughes's poem, the one that I gave them, they were going on about, you know, what it was like being a teenager and having to eat fish fingers, which has nothing to do with the poem. They might say, I might argue that that's actually the emotional feeling is the same. But anyway, they say this isn't time. And what happens, they also say, is that the lowest achievers get squashed out in these oracy situations because the more able students dominate.

13:33I have heard that argument. So they say this approach fails the least able students. What would you say to that? Well, I would say that the evidence doesn't really support that view. So there's a lot of quite robust research which shows that those sort of dialogic, talk-rich approaches to teaching that you were talking about earlier really do improve attainment. And that that's particularly pronounced for children who are eligible for free school meals. So those kind of economically disadvantaged students. And that's not what I hear from teachers either.

14:03So when I talk to teachers who are focusing on oracy in their classrooms, they often tell me that a focus on oracy actually helps students who might otherwise struggle to access the curriculum, particularly through writing, you know, giving them the chance to talk about their learning actually kind of opens up the curriculum to them. And I guess in reality, you can't just transfer what the teacher knows into the students' heads. You know, students don't just absorb knowledge. They need to process that information. And talk is a really effective way of doing that.

14:35Let me go back to when I was at school. That was in the 1950s, primary school anyway, classroom full of 48 children. And talk went like this. If you had something to say, you had to put your hand up. You said it one-to-one to the teacher. The teacher spoke to you. Or you, yes, waited for the teacher to ask a question, point at you, and you had to try and answer. That was about the limit. Anything else was naughty, actually. What do you think about that as a way of learning?

15:06Look at me. I'm a success, he said boastfully. I came through that system. What would you think was wrong with that? I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that. I think it's about, we often talk about teachers' repertoire. So being able to use different approaches at different moments within a lesson. So sometimes it might be that the most effective thing that a teacher can do is to explain something really clearly. So do that sort of teacher exposition that you're sort of describing there. Sometimes it might be, you know, asking questions, listing student responses.

15:39Other times it might be like opening up the floor for discussion as a classroom. And I think what teachers do really well is kind of judiciously deciding which of those methods is appropriate when. So you're not talking about denying the teacher the role of being the knowledgeable other, the knowledgeable person in the room. You're saying that you use the word repertoire, that in a classroom a teacher would sometimes be the knowledgeable other, sometimes be doing this kind of dialogic learning that we're talking about. Other times, question, answer, question, answer.

16:10So they're working across a range. That's what you're saying, yes? Yes, I was in a school and I was observing a maths lesson and the episode that I taught, you know, because I came in there like, right, let's let's kind of do the oracy bit. And it was a maths teacher and they were learning about adding fractions and the teacher was sharing an example of, you know, a mistake that someone had made that added these fractions incorrectly. They gave this wrong example to the students and just sort of asked them to unpick what was wrong and what this fictional student that had made this mistake might have done. So we were walking around the classroom, I was going around with the teacher and I could hear them saying things like, you know, you've added the top and the bottom, but you can't do that.

16:46Or pointing out that the denominators were different and then to add the fractions, you had to make the denominators the same. So the lowest common denominator, I've just, LCD, I've just remembered it. Yes, something must have gone in. Yes, sorry. Go on. Yes. So I guess, so in that example, the teacher had created this opportunity for the children to apply their learning. They were using it in a new context. They were having to, yeah, to put that learning that they'd done into action. And as the teacher was moving around, he could hear them, you know, he could, the talk was giving him a sort of window into what they were thinking.

17:18He could pick up if they had a misconception, which he could then draw on later. And that's not to say that in a previous lesson or even earlier on in that lesson, he hadn't done, you know, an explanation of how to add fractions, you know, and gone through that method step by step. You know, that was appropriate at that point in the lesson. And at this point in the lesson, it was about getting students to use their RSC skills to kind of apply that knowledge and practice.

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18:20All while keeping you in the driver's seat. Take five to stay in your car ten minute oil change. Save up to 30% on your next oil change to take five. $15 value. Valid at participating locations. Terms and conditions apply. Now, let me complicate this a little. The students I was working with on that day, they spoke with a London accent and dialect. They used expressions like them things and we was, very familiar to me as a Londoner. So, is that bad oracy? Is that bad talk? No, I don't think there's such a thing as bad oracy and bad talk.

18:51There might be different contexts that we might speak in where we might choose to use different dialects. So, for example, it might be that in a job interview or a presentation, those children might choose to speak in kind of standard English rather than in their kind of local London dialect. And we want to help children develop that kind of flexibility in their spoken language. We want to create this kind of rich linguistic sort of repertoire and we want them to be able to do that. But it's not about saying, you know, the way that you're speaking in this context is wrong.

19:23I think we have to be quite careful about that when it comes to oracy because, you know, our ways of speaking are really connected to our identity. You know, when we speak, that tells us something about, like, who we are, where we're from, the cultural references that we identify with. I think that there's a risk that you're saying to students there, you know, that way of speaking and by extension, you know, you aren't welcome in the classroom. So, I think we need to be really careful about how we treat those sort of dialect features. So, what you said there, part of oracy teaching is teaching contexts.

19:56So, it's OK for them, when discussing a poem like that, to be saying we was and them things and that sort of thing. But, of course, in exams, they might be penalised for that. So, we've got to make children aware of that, haven't we, that there are, in this particular case, let's say, two versions of the language, we were and we was. And we was is OK for chatting about a poem, but we were is what you do in the exam. So, part of oracy is teaching that as well. Yeah. So, in that context, when you're talking about the poem, that's children engaging in what we call, or what an academic called Douglas Barnes termed, exploratory talk.

20:30So, that's when you're, like, developing your thinking, your understanding through talk, and you need to do that in the language that feels most comfortable for you. It doesn't matter if you're saying, you know, we, we was. So, now let's talk about fluency.

Oracy and Fluency

20:42That's another word I hear on the air. Is that an important part of oracy, or is it the same thing? Are oracy and fluency the same thing? No, I think we need to be really careful when we use the word fluency in relation to oracy, because there are lots of people who are brilliant communicators, but who might not speak fluently. So, for example, someone who stammers might not speak fluently. And I think when we say things like, you know, the government are going to make sure that every child learns to speak fluently as part of a focus on oracy, I think that can be quite exclusionary for people who might not speak fluently.

21:14So, I think we need to be careful about kind of conflating oracy and fluency. And then I also think it stops us thinking about context. So, some of those exploratory contexts for talk that we've been discussing today. So, when you're, you know, thinking about ideas and approaching those for the first time through talk, you know, you might not be doing that particularly fluently. We often call that kind of messy talk, and it's not supposed to be polished because it's where you're thinking, and you might say something and then change your mind, or someone might interject. And that's good because that's that really kind of productive, messy talk for learning.

21:45And we don't necessarily want that to be fluent. Now, you've touched there on someone who might be stammering, let's say. There are other issues, aren't there, about inclusion and exclusion. I mean, I work with teachers doing a master's where they often look at how children and school students talk about books, and they make transcripts of those conversations, and we discuss these in the seminars. And quite often, we do come up with questions to do with a child or children who are saying nothing or held back in some way or another.

22:16They don't ever quite finish a thought. We see it in the transcripts. So what can we do about that? So I think that's an important question because when we first start working with teachers and we start to think a bit more deliberately about classroom talk, often that's what teachers will notice first. It will be, oh, look at these children. They haven't said anything. They were silent as part of this discussion. And it's often a concern that teachers have when they're thinking about oracy. This idea that a focus on oracy will kind of amplify the voices of the loudest children

22:46and then kind of push the quieter children further to the margins of the classroom. Personally, I think good oracy teaching should do the opposite of that. I think when you're creating a classroom where you've got this culture and this expectation that children participate in this really rich classroom dialogue where you're creating opportunities for children to engage in discussion, and when you're teaching them the skills to do that and teaching them the skills isn't just about teaching the quieter children the skills to speak up and join in that discussion.

23:18Often it could be teaching other children to actually notice the balance of contributions in a discussion and notice when Poppy hasn't contributed and say, you know, what do you think, Poppy? Sometimes it might be that children need like a scaffold, as we call them, to kind of contribute. So it might be that you'd give Poppy a sentence to them. So she's not having to think about the language to kind of offer her idea. She's got that and then she can hang her thinking and idea off that. You mean like a stem like what I think is or something like that? Yeah, something like that. So she doesn't have to focus too much on how to start saying her idea.

23:51She's got that. She's got that sentence stem. She can just focus on, you know, what the actual thing that she wants to say is. What I've noticed from some of the transcripts that we look at in our seminars is that sometimes the knowledgeable other, who to start off with is the teacher, that maybe a child will emerge not as a dominant force, but as with some kind of special knowledge. I'm thinking in particular of one study of one of my teacher students, that there was a book about refugees. There was a boy in the class who was a refugee.

24:22One child said something like, oh, I don't think refugees would do that or whatever. And then this boy who came from a refugee family then contradicted and said, well, actually, I'm a refugee. And then we noticed in the next transcript, a day or so later, they turned to that boy and then said, well, you know about that. So within that oracy context, he became the knowledgeable other. So I thought it was really interesting. And that happens quite often. There's children spotting it in each other.

24:53And I think that's brilliant, isn't it? I think that learning is so rich when children get to bring their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own perspectives into the classroom. You know, that children are not kind of empty vessels that know nothing. They bring their own knowledge, their own experiences to bear on what's taught in the classroom. And I think oracy is a really effective way of kind of bringing those experiences into the classroom. So here's another story for you. OK, from 16 to 18, I went to a very, very successful grammar school, which sent a whole batch of students off to Oxbridge and everyone went off to university and so on.

25:24Now, our head teacher had the idea that we should widen our perspectives. And he sent us on school exchanges. And I arrived in an English lesson at Winchester, you know, one of the top three private schools. And it was on Thomas Hardy, my favourite. And in my school, that would have been a lesson where we would have had a kind of lecture from a very knowledgeable teacher. And we would take notes and then write an essay. But in Winchester, OK, the teacher sat with his feet up on the table, really. And he looked at the class at the beginning of the lesson and said, Thomas Hardy, optimist or pessimist?

26:01And that was the beginning and end of his contribution. And we spent the next hour discussing it. So I'm now talking 16 to 18. So how would you typify what has gone on there? That I was at my grammar school, I was getting one kind of education. And over there at Winchester, they seem to be having something else. How would you describe what was going on there? So I guess they're two sort of quite distinct approaches to teaching. And that kind of picture that you paint there is quite vivid, isn't it? With the, I don't know, the teacher with his like feet on the desk.

26:31But you've got one approach where the teacher is explaining all about Thomas Hardy to you. You're learning, you're kind of, he's imparting that knowledge on you. And I guess it might have been that, you know, later on in that sequence of learning, you might have been expected to use that knowledge, whether it's in writing an essay, whether it's having a debate or a discussion about that. Not usually a discussion because there wasn't time, A-levels, you know, jam-packed curriculum. They told us we want to go to university. We'll just scribble down these notes and then make sure to use them in the essay. But here, somehow or other, there was time for this chat.

27:04I mean, honestly, that sounds like quite familiar now in the classroom. Like, I would imagine that there are lots of schools that pose questions like that to children and then, you know, get them to apply what they've learned to that question through that kind of whole class discussion. I think there's lots and lots of schools, you know, state schools, you know, across the UK that are creating those opportunities. And I think it is a really rich approach to learning, isn't it? You're using that knowledge that you have about Thomas Hardy in that context. You're having to kind of manipulate that knowledge, listen to other people's perspectives,

27:37justify what you think. It might be that you hear what someone else says, that you change your mind. You need to bring evidence from the text to kind of explain your opinions. And I think that sounds like a great way to learn. But obviously, there are other ways to learn as well. And it's that idea of repertoire again, isn't it? Yes, yes. It just sits in my mind. I can just see it so clearly. Now, a point for listeners. This programme is produced, as you may know, in partnership with the OU, the Open University. If you'd like to listen to my conversation with the OU about the words we use,

28:07my own language journey, and what I've learnt from the stories behind how we speak, you can visit the BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth programme page and follow the links to the Open University. Now, quite often, Amy, on this programme, I give the guest a magic wand and say, if you had that wand in your hand, what changes you would like to see? And I guess also, how could those changes be implemented? So there you go. There's my magic wand. What are you going to do?

28:38Thank you. What would I do? I would want to see every child benefiting from what we call a high-quality Oricy education. And to make that happen, I think there are a couple of things. So I think, firstly, we need to make sure that there's proper training for every teacher in Oricy and that that's funded at a national level, so it's something that every teacher gets. And alongside that, I think I'd like to see what we call an Oricy leader in every school, so somebody who can champion Oricy, who can support colleagues to develop it in their classroom,

29:10who can think really strategically about how Oricy is developed across the school. So we've spent this whole programme exploring the importance of talk, and can I say I've very much enjoyed talking with you today. We've done a bit of Oricy on the programme, haven't we? Amy Gawne, thanks very much indeed. Thank you. One hundred and two miles ago, the oil light came on. One hundred miles ago, you'd noticed. Now, it's time to head to Take Five. This oil change, fall in love with your car all over again.

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