We need to talk about oracy

Silence might be  golden, but talk is magical. 

It is interesting that the latest focus is on oracy when the past decade has been obsessed around silence. We’ve obsessed around silent students, silent classrooms and silent corridors. The major proxy for learning has been silence. SLT have been patrolling corridors to see that classrooms are quiet. Good teaching has always been marked by the amount of silence there is. Silence is golden. Noisy is excrement. 

As a parent, I know that a silent child is not a good thing. 

Silence is easy to create, patrol, police, enforce, control, make and monitor. In fact, in schools it is the one thing that is pretty easy to get. Our obsession with silence is because of the messiness of talking. It defies structures, lists, ticklists and so on. It is ephemeral. It is chimerical. It is a shapeshifter. It is so much harder to define, observe, and teach than silence. And that’s the crux of it. Silence is easy. Talking is difficult.  

The irony now is that these silent classrooms now need to show some oracy. Some talk. Some chattering. Some blethering. We have schools scrabbling to write oracy policies, as nothing shows Ofsted that you take something seriously like a policy. But, like using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut, we are destined for sledgehammer approaches. We’ve some of these already like forcing students to only speak in full sentences. Boy, that must make answering the register. Sir, I am here sat on my chair. Sir, I am also here. Or, we will see enforced talking opportunities in lessons. We will see everything turned into a debate. Right, we’ve covered hot and cold colour so let’s debate about our favourite colour! Or, we might see a continuous pattern of chat before you write approaches adopted by schools. 

Because oracy is messy and complex we really struggle to frame it in lessons. We know for reading and writing that there are a number of processes to think about before students read or write. We know their level of proficiency. We know what we can do to help them. We know that we can approach reading or writing from a particular ange to be more conducive to learning. Do we have the same for talking in the classroom? The answer is no. We tend to narrow talk to those that are compliant and those who are not. 

If a school is going to tackle oracy, then then need to look at the processes involved. And, I mean really look. Those could mean joining an existing conversation , showing the speaker I am listening, keeping a conversation going, changing the direction of a conversation and so on. There is so much to pick. So let’s start with turn taking. Something that every teacher can work on in most if not all lessons. 

How do we teach turn taking in lessons? 

It is important to think about this in conversations and in particular for some SEND students. We make assumptions about these things. 

Think about these questions: 

• What is a turn? 

• What do I do if I want a turn? 

• What does it mean when it is my turn? 

• How long is a turn? 

• How do I start my turn? 

• How do I end my turn? 

• What do I do when it is someone else's turn? 

• What do I do if I don’t get a turn? 

The insistence of cold calling means that some of these things are not reinforced in the classroom environment. They are also not reinforced at home or at meal times. As a parent, you know that you tend to do a lot of this learning over meals. Can I finish what I was saying first? Let your sister finish what she was saying. 

From a teacher’s perspective, these questions are important to have because we are the modellers and course correctors in lessons. Look at these possible comments by a teacher. 

• Tom, what do we do when we are waiting for our turn? 

• Tom, you didn’t get a go. What should you have done? 

• Tom, you need to think about others having a go now. 

• Tom, that isn’t what we do when we want to show we’d like a turn. 

As you can see, it is the teacher indirectly reinforcing the rules. The teacher is teaching turn taking through their interaction and their questions or comments. They are not doing it before and frontloading things but as they speak. And that’s the rub. Oracy is done in the process and not frontloaded before the process. Teachers have to get their hands dirty and teach in the middle of the process as it is going on. It isn’t a checklist. It isn’t a Powerpoint slide. It isn’t a worksheet. It isn’t a YouTube video.  

Oracy is far more complex and I worry that schools are over simplifying it to the point of it being ineffective. Children need teachers to be course correctors in speech. Schools need to be looking at lessons and thinking how teacher interactions can support oracy. And, that is largely in the moment. If it was me, I would be looking at student and teacher conversations in lessons in training. What could the teacher have said here to support oracy? 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. I plan to blog more on oracy over the next few weeks. 

Metaphor, Oracy and Real Speech in An Inspector Calls

One of the problems around plays and teaching them is that students struggle to analyse them. Give them a piece of prose and they can analyse it until their hearts explode. Yet, dialogue is always the one that stumps them. 

For years, I have seen teachers teach plays focusing on dramatic devices or the same few big quotes. The problem is that students are not experiencing analysing dialogue. Real dialogue. So, when faced with an approximation of speech, they struggle and falter. If we think of curriculums, how many feature real speech? Instead students are fed a diet of literary texts that range from school to school. All texts are chosen to be similar or prepare students for the GCSE exams. But, because no real speech is included, there is no real need for it to be covered - in some people’s eyes. 

Students really enjoy J.B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’ and I wouldn’t say it is for the plot. It is for the accessibility of the language. It is real. It is understandable. However, their engagement isn’t reflected in their analysis. They default as usual to the plot, the character, the moments and the ideas, but not about the specifics and the choices made by the writer. If anything is remembered, it is big clunky things the teacher has said and not what they have found. The teacher told us to say it. Yes, students can tell us about the lighting change, but they can’t tell us about Mrs Brilling's use of ‘that’ in ‘a girl of that class’. 

I feel that we need to get more real dialogue into English and stop getting so hung up about literary analysis all the time. 

Take the following questions: 

• Who speaks the most? 

• Who speaks the least? 

• Who asks the most questions? 

• Who is the politest? 

• Who is the least politest? 

• Who is the most formal? 

• Who is the least formal? 

• Who copies the way another person speaks? 

• Who tries to speak differently to all the rest? 

All of these questions relate to language choices and they are a start of exploration. The next question is ‘why’. Why does the character speak the most? Why is the character speaking so informally? Surprisingly, these are very rarely written about in essays. They seem too obvious for students. Students would rather write a paragraph of guff about the Inspector saying ‘I don’t play golf’ than explore the destabilising methods the Inspector uses to unsettle Mr Birling. The limited speech. The questions. The lack of politeness. The lack of reverence. 

Now, I know Priestley has a bazillion different adverbs for stage directions and ‘coolly’ I think they are helpful, but Priestley's dialogue is so rich for analysis. Characters who shift pronouns in discussion - ‘you’ to ‘we’. Characters who use euphemism to hide their involvement in things - ‘business’. Characters who distance themselves - ‘a girl of that class’. 

One area I think is under-’mined’ is metaphors. How, in particular, Priestley uses metaphor to support ideas. Take, for example, the following ones: 

 Birling: (angrily) inspector, I've told you before, I don't like the tone nor the way you're handling this inquiry. And I don't propose to give you much rope

• Ideas about crime and punishment 

• Relates to the amount of evidence - the more rope, the stronger the case 

• Foreshadows their doom  - and death of the family 

• Presents himself as a victim 

Birling: Rubbish! If you don't come down sharply on some of these people, they'd soon be asking for the earth.

• Ludicrous statement - you cannot ask for the earth 

• Makes it seem that they want everything - ‘the earth’ - inverts the situation and says they are greedy

• With earth we associate natural things and in a way they are asking for natural things like - food, warmth, home 

• Highlights the unnaturalness of society - asking for something basic 

Birling: Have you any idea what happened to her after that? Get into trouble? Go on the streets?

• Implies that Eva became a prostitute - euphemistic metaphor 

• Says a lot about Mr Birling. He assumes that when a woman gets into trouble her only way out is prostitution. 

• Implies that poor women have less morals 

Sheila: Yes, of course it is. That's what I meant when I talked about building up a wall that's sure to be knocked flat. It makes it all harder to bear.

• Implies how the rich defend themselves - place a barrier around themselves for protection

• Walls reflect their lack of flexibility or willingness to change - indicates their arrogance and stubbornness to change  

Of course, there are loads of metaphors throughout the play, but we need to make students willing to spot and explore them more. Being language curious is the key thing here. Not to go back to the knowledge debate, but we have become obsessed with teaching the knowledge of texts rather the knowledge to explore texts. I mean that we’ve got to the point where we deskill students by teaching a text around precise knowledge and precisely formulated ideas. Students should instead be using knowledge to form their own ideas. 

Teach students that we talk in metaphor and unleash them on a text and explore it.  

If we want to take oracy seriously, then we need to look harder at the examples we use. Oracy needs to be modelled more than it needs to be taught. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris