How much talk is there in your classroom? Not low-level chatter, but time is given by you for pupils to speak their minds, answer questions, discuss lesson content and debate with each other? For some teachers, the answer will be “most of the lesson”; for others, it will be “as little as possible”; and some might ask: “Does it really matter?”
Neil Mercer, emeritus professor of education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and director of Oracy Cambridge in the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, believes it does matter. A lot.
He concedes that the idea of promoting questioning, elaboration, and participation as a good classroom tactic isn’t “rocket science” but believes that this sums up the issue oracy faces: it sounds obvious, so is overlooked.
“Talk is taken for granted,” he says.
Partly, this is down to a belief among some that “talking” is natural and that teaching oracy skills is less important than other literacy skills. Often, that’s not a conscious thought but, he says, you can see it in action when teachers give children discussion or group work tasks without any training on how to structure those conversations.
“You don’t say to children, ‘Right now we’re going to do some long division and I’m sure you all know how to do that so just get on with it’, and it’s the same with asking children to work in groups and have discussions and debates,” says Mercer. “If you don’t prepare them for working well in groups, then they won’t. But if you do, it’s dynamite – and the research backs it up.”
Research studies are very clear that teaching children spoken-language skills has measurable benefits – from improved reasoning and debating skills to confidence in public speaking and problem-solving.
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