Claire Brooks - How can I ensure quiet students engage in Oracy-based activities? According to the APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group), ‘Oracy is key to success in literacy’. Alex Quigley, in his book ‘Closing the Reading Gap’, states that “Oracy supports metacognition’. Menzies and Millard report that “Oracy boosts decoding skills and reading Comprehension”. How could I ignore this research from reliable sources? As an English teacher, of course I expect my students to develop their literacy and be aware of how they learn, but what could I do if some students were reluctant to participate in oracy activities? If it was only the confident speakers who were making most progress, my challenge was to get the quiet students in both my English and E1M lessons to fully participate in oracy-based activities. I decided to focus on a year 7 English class. In this class, there are three students with ASD who do not like working in groups - this is specified on two of their SEN passports. One of the students used to wear defenders when we did ‘Turn and Talk’ tasks. There is another student who used to suffer from anxiety and speak so quietly that no one could hear. There are two students who spoke very quietly and took time to articulate their ideas, much to the frustration of some peers. In contrast, there are many confident speakers, some of whom already knew each other from Primary School, and had performed together in their school production of Oliver Twist, our first unit of work at CEC. I soon realised that I would have to prepare very specific scaffolding and roles to enable the quieter students to succeed, not just for academic/cognitive development but for their emotional well-being too. I also wanted the more vocal students to become better listeners. I started by re-reading some material from Voice 21 and searching their most recent findings. I used Voice 21’s ‘Oracy Framework: Capturing Progress’ grid. Despite reading about the emotional and social impact of Oracy in ‘The state of Speaking in our schools’ I decided to focus on just the Cognitive and Linguistic aspects, as this was my reason for targeting these students. I studied several models of sentence starters used by various teachers and researchers such as Lemov’s ‘Habits of Discussion sentence starters’, Voice 21’s suggestions, and sentence starters displayed by a school in the Tower Hamlets Oracy Hub. I also researched the effect of roles within discussion such as clarifier and summariser. Although familiar with allocating roles to students, on reflection, in the past I had given anxious or shy students the role of recorder, scribe or assessor to avoid forcing them to speak. I found many good ideas for using oracy strategies to build vocabulary and discuss ideas, but I struggled to find out how any of these roles worked particularly well with students who do not like talking. According to Isabel Beck, “text is a far less effective vehicle for learning new words than oral language.” (2013). I had to find a way.
Approaches I used included: ➢ Adapting text on PowerPoint slides. I took out what I would say anyway, and instead added very specific instructions as to who to discuss the question with and for how long (See example below). This had the effect of a calm, focused start ASD students.
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