Sarah Wyeth – Barriers to oracy in the classroom. I don’t think any of us doubt the importance of oracy in the classroom by now. So why isn’t oracy threaded through our curriculum in a slick and integrated way? Why are we not all proficient dialogic practitioners? There was a question in a recent feedback form to staff asked, ”Should we add to our non-negotiables that we only ever cold call in lesson? No hands up, apart from when ‘taking the temperature’ of whole class understanding / comprehension.” This got me thinking about how hard it is to get some students to speak at all let alone extend their answers. We tread that line of attempting to expertly stretch and challenge our keen outgoing students yet support and coax our less confident ones. We all know a particular student with their hand up before the end of a question has been finished and you know they haven’t formulated an answer and when they do, it may only be very loosely linked to the topic and possibly involve a tedious tale of a distant relative. You know this student needs validation but you also need to crack on with the learning. At this juncture, the cold calling route only seems humane but teaching and learning aimed towards strong oracy skills needs planning for and building. How can we remove the barriers to effective classroom oracy? My two main sources for answers are ‘Speaking up: The importance of Oracy in teaching and learning’ by Will Millard and Any Gauntmay 2018 and ‘The State of Speaking in Our Schools’ by Will Millard and Loic Menzies – Voice 21. I also asked two of my classes for their ideas. Here is a table found on p55 of ‘The State of Speaking in Our Schools’ by Will Millard and Loic Menzies – Voice 21 exploring the barriers to oracy.
Here are 5 main barriers and potential ways of tackling them. Time “If teachers think ‘we’re wasting time’ or ‘we’re spending too long talking’ [then] maybe that means that the talk hasn’t been scaffolded correctly. If you’re doing really good talk and they’re working really well, then it really will support thinking about those [learning] outcomes” Amy Gaunt, Head of Oracy Primary, School 21 Teachers will always need to balance the demands of a content heavy curriculum with how that content is consumed. When teachers feel confident in building in well planned oracy tasks, this will enable better access to that curriculum. 228
