What is oracy?
Oracy is the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech. It's also about understanding and interpreting spoken language.
Oracy is an essential skill for navigating the world and it’s particularly crucial in educational settings. Within the context of education, oracy can be broken down into four key strands:
- Physical: This involves the technical use of voice and body language, such as tone, volume, pace and gesture.
- Linguistic: This focuses on the use of language, including vocabulary, grammar, structure, and the ability to adapt language to different situations or audiences.
- Cognitive: This encompasses the structuring of thoughts, development of ideas and critical thinking skills.
- Social and Emotional: This involves the use of language in social contexts, understanding others, expressing emotions, and developing relationships.
By understanding and developing these elements of oracy, teachers can help students improve their communication skills, enhance their learning, and increase their overall academic achievement.
Why does oracy matter?
Speaking and listening - the fundamentals of oracy - are like bread and butter for English teachers. The spirited class discussions, lively debates, group presentations and impromptu drama and role-play activities are a huge part of why we love teaching our subject so much.
There's increasing evidence to show how fundamentally important these oracy skills are to students' progress, life opportunities and their attainment, particularly at GCSE level. Voice 21, England's leading oracy charity, suggests that spoken language skills are 'one of the strongest predictors of a child’s future life chances'.
For children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the language gap starts before primary school and widens throughout their learning journey at secondary school, to GCSEs and beyond. The impact of the pandemic and school closures on the attainment gap and Pupil Premium students is still being researched, but the oracy all-party parliamentary group have acknowledged the scale of the impact on disadvantaged pupils compared with more advantaged peers. Their 2021 report, Speak for Change, recognised the need to raise the status and priority of oracy in education. It sets out shared expectations for oracy teaching in primary and secondary schools, focusing on the positive impact of oral language interventions.
By focusing on these crucial oracy skills, we can narrow the gap and improve all students' academic outcomes and communication skills, as well as increase their self-confidence and wellbeing.
Oracy in the National Curriculum
The National Curriculum emphasises the importance of oracy, recognising oracy skills as fundamental to a student's educational development. It stipulates that students should be taught to speak clearly, convey ideas confidently in standard English, and prepare and participate effectively in debates and presentations. For teachers, this means integrating activities that promote speaking and listening skills into lesson planning. It also involves creating a classroom environment that encourages open communication, fosters critical thinking, and facilitates active participation from all students. The focus on oracy not only enhances students' verbal communication skills but also contributes to their overall academic achievement and future life chances.
How to build oracy skills in the classroom
Building oracy skills is vital for students' development and success. This can be achieved by incorporating group discussions, debates, and presentations into lessons, using role-play activities, and implementing peer feedback sessions. These methods help students practice and improve their speaking and listening skills, articulate their thoughts, and gain confidence in their abilities in a supportive environment where they feel comfortable expressing their ideas.
CPD resources on oracy and the language gap
Here, we share useful webinars, toolkits and resources for classroom teachers, middle leaders and headteachers to find strategies and ideas to support students with building oracy, vocabulary and language skills.
- Developing oracy strategies in the classroom is a free 30 minute on-demand webinr from the Teachit Talks series, where teacher and author of Talking about Oracy, Sarah Davies, looks at how we can develop effective oracy strategies in the classroom. Download the webinar and PowerPoint to watch at any time for practical advice and evidence-based strategies.
- Accelerating vocabulary at secondary school, published in collaboration with Oxford University Press, is a toolkit of teaching ideas to support your professional development, as well as games and classroom strategies to raise students' word consciousness, increase classroom talk and develop students' oracy.
- School leaders, headteachers and classroom teachers might also find the ideas for vocabulary and oral language interventions in Closing the word gap: activities for the classroom helpful. It includes a whole-school approach to language development.
- Tutors can help to close the word gap and develop students' oracy skills in form time by regularly inspiring students with a curiosity about words, encouraging more classroom talk, sharing a love of books and reading, and having fun with words. 20 ideas for closing the word gap and developing oracy skills in tutor time is a resource featuring ideas including displays, reading for pleasure, form quizzes, games and word sharing.
Classroom resources to develop students' oracy and language skills
Try these flexible and engaging oracy templates, designed for KS3-5 students, to build oracy skills across all subjects. The templates aim to provide students with a solid foundation in communication skills that will benefit them throughout their academic and professional lives including:
- structuring their ideas and arguments effectively and coherently
- listening actively and responding positively to different points of view
- developing critical thinking skills
- building confidence in public speaking.
For English teachers, this selection of KS3 and GCSE English speaking and listening resources and lesson ideas provide engaging and effective methods of supporting and developing students’ oracy and language skills.
- For year 7s, use Dragon's quest - lateral thinking discussion tasks for vocabulary and oracy development over a series of lessons with imaginative quest activities.
- Try Chat cards for a talkative first lesson or ice-breaker activity that builds language and oracy skills.
- Use Speaking and listening assessment cards to help students become attentive listeners and give constructive feedback after presentations.
- Make a better speech can help students develop their speaking skills and confidence with speaking.
- Pair Controversial topics with Debate flashcards to engage students in debating and persuasive language skills.
