Sarah Welton - What impact does literature focussed oracy tasks delivered over two weeks have on the comprehension skills for Year 10 in comparison to Year 8?

Sarah Welton - What impact does literature focussed oracy tasks delivered over two weeks have on the comprehension skills for Year 10 in comparison to Year 8?

Within Cowes Enterprise College, and indeed across many schools, as students get older they begin to feel a greater sense of social anxiety and allow their personal issues to increasingly invade the classroom. This means that many students try to say as little as possible when directed to answer questions, but I noticed this the most in Year 10.

With this in mind, I chose to measure the impact on specific oracy tasks which developed the Year 10s’ ability to speak aloud in comparison to Year 8s completing similar tasks over a two week period. I will be looking at how well the Year 10 students respond to the tasks and if their comprehension on Macbeth improves due to this; this will then be compared to Year 8s and their comprehension following similar tasks for Descriptive Writing and Animal Farm.

I n t e n t :

When researching last year, I found most resources and research for oracy was tailored more towards Primary than Secondary. Over the year, I have seen that Year 8 are generally more receptive towards oracy and listening/learning from one another; I wanted to spend time trying to address this issue with Year 10 and see whether these tasks could be adapted upwards to engage KS4.

This particular Year 10 carry considerable personal issues with them which has caused many of them to become consumed by the complexities of their circumstances within the classroom – often not being respectful to others who may be speaking. In addition to this, the double COVID lockdown they have experienced appears to have made them more lethargic and less driven to succeed. The knock-on effect of this has impacted not only their written work, but also their want to engage with the discussions in the room.

I decided to focus mostly on the students who speak the most within the classroom, but not necessarily about the topic offered to them. For the purpose of comparison, I have chosen similar students in Year 8 to focus on. The reason for this is to hone these students into having more productive conversations within the classroom with more guided tasks. This would then help the weaker students to hear and comprehend the text from their peers, and so hopefully more likely to retain the information required for their exams.

R e s e a r c h :

Last year, I found various research which promoted oracy (as stated above, mostly with a Primary focus); in 2017, Antony Luby (in Combating Language Poverty: Improving oracy and dialogue in schools) offered an opinion that in thirty years, they had never experienced this ‘quality of conversation’ naturally. With this in mind, I needed to be aware of my questioning after the discussion tasks in order to try to raise the ‘quality’ of the feedback. There was little way in a class environment for me to offer this specific improvement to all students, so I adapted my tasks to have guidance for all, then challenging the responses from the few.

One of Luby’s example tasks was to listen to audio stories. Whilst studying the literature texts this year, the students engaged the most when other students read characters aloud from the play. However, it was a challenge finding students willing to read the play aloud; I also tried audio books, but many disagreed with the narrator (though I’ve had success with previous year groups). For this group in particular, neither of these options seemed a good fit for engagement.

Valuing every voice from Voice21 had several adaptable tasks for a secondary environment. One of the key sections I want to use is the discussion guidelines. This sets out really clear expectations which is exactly what the Year 10 group need to help them be more thoughtful towards the other students in the classroom.

Within the National Oracy Leadership Programme: Choosing engaging stimuli, Voice21 have several tasks which need minimum input to recreate for various subjects; one could potentially create an atmosphere of discussions and, more importantly, relevant opinions, and another could help consolidate the information needed to learn for an exam situation.

Further to the above, The Plymouth Oracy Project, 2019, offers key words to help promote better conversations, such as: speculate, imagine, explore (more detail in the task area below). These could be a great resource to develop discussions more specifically, and, with this Year 10 group in particular, offer triggers and guidance without seeming patronising.

A c t i o n :

In regard to teaching processes, I chose a selection of tasks from my research above and applied them to Year 10 revision and the Year 8 Animal Farm unit.

One of the first tasks was titled ‘Would you rather?’ from the National Oracy Leadership Programme: Choosing engaging stimuli. For Year 10, I tied this into the contextual and thematic focuses of An Inspector Calls. This allowed the students to discuss and remind themselves of a previous topic; I believed it would also be effective at allowing the students to access their prior knowledge without realising it (as they are generally reluctant to revise themselves).

The second task was titled ‘Always, sometimes, never’ – also from the Voice 21, National Oracy Leadership Programme. I adapted this to reference all of the skills that the students need in their exams (and should know by this point already), but students needed to discuss which ones specifically relevant to certain questions. This task would be used to consolidate information and allow the students to revise through discussions.

The final task was using the discussion prompts from The Plymouth Oracy Project, 2019; I hope that this would be the most effective with the Year 10 students as it guided them towards developing their discussions in a more detailed, thoughful direction – something many of them struggle with as they often give short answers and do not develop their ideas further.

E v a l u a t i o n :

Having completed these tasks, I found the Year 10s were generally receptive, but quickly went off task. For instance with the ‘Would you rather?’ task, students were given a very short time frame, able to decide on their opinion and offer their ideas aloud. The problem came when developing these ideas and/or explaining why they chose the opinion they did.

Some students did well with this; an example was I asked a student to ‘Give me some hypotheticals’ to expand their ideas for the question Would you rather play it safe or accept the consequences? They replied stating ‘In a business, if you’re trying to sell a product and you went for it and it succeeded’. In another example, a lower ability student who is more vocal was asked for their opinion on ‘Would you rather follow a bad leader or stand up for what’s right?’ They stated that ‘If you just follow a bad leader, then it will all be fine.’ I asked if their opinion would still stand if the bad leader was starving them or paying them the least amount possible. Their response was that if they stood up, they would just be ‘shot, dead’. Although

Comparably, the Year 8s began with relatively silly comments, but when questioned showed more depth of understanding as a class than the Year 10s. For instance in response to whether they would rather be by the forest or by the water, one student said ‘set a fire’ by the forest, and another said ‘drown’ in the water. However, when questioned, the forest student developed their ideas into the resources a forest could create (such as creating housing, tools etc) and the water student developed into the fish that would be available for food. They also listened better to each other using statements like ‘similar to Student X’, or ‘I would also probably choose the trees because…’ Building on this, I then implemented the Plymouth Oracy discussion phrases in order to try to develop this Year 10 weakness and prompt them into a more detailed response. I gave them seven key terms and two minutes to discuss a quotation from Macbeth in preparation to feedback as a class.

An example of a weaker student speaking up transpired as (T – teacher, S – student):

T: Let’s prove it then please. S, how do we know that we can’t trust them? S: Because they’re liars. T: When? S: Always, like when they lied about killing Duncan.

This student started with a shorter answer, but gave a longer more specific answer for the second question. I hope that this task would create the environment where students were able to extend their ideas, and in the majority it did!

Again, as a comparable to a Year 8 conversation with a weaker student:

T: Explain, what made you think that? S: Well, he’s obviously not very nice. He’s very mean to everyone. I mean it kind of sounds like he just gets whatever he wants. I’d assume he wouldn’t behave like that for no reason.

The difference between these two is obvious; the Year 10 student required more input in order to develop their ideas further, whereas the Year 8 student was more able to articulate their thoughts and feelings without prompting. Although this is only looking at two examples, within these classes (both of which are mixed ability) I found that overall the Year 8s were less in need of scaffold to offer an idea, and Year 10 needed several extra questions to support – possibly aluding towards a reluctance in responding in front of their peers.

In regard to next steps, there is a two-fold development. Firstly, the Year 10s need greater stimulus and prompting. They are a year group who do not shy away from conversations and opinion outside of class work, yet when required to use these exact skills, they retract possibly to hide a lack of self-belief or perhaps as an auditory work avoidance tactic.

These student need more tasks like the Narrate, Explain, Speculate, but with more guidance on what the outcome of these discussions should look like without teacher questioning. It would be good to trial this over a longer period with more examples, some scaffolding, perhaps sentence starters to see if any of these additional methods help the students to enhance their oracy skills.

The second area would be the Year 8s. Although they are strong now, the nurturing of this skill needs to be maintained in order to retain the balance that the majority are able to articulate and extend their ideas without immediate teacher intervention. Fostering a love for sharing ideas and speculation on texts will be key to keeping this skill alive in KS3 through to KS4.