Why Oracy Has Become Central to My English Teaching

There was a classroom I observed early in my teaching career that I have never quite managed to forget, though not because anything went wrong.

The lesson was orderly, purposeful, disciplined in all the ways that formal observation schedules tend to reward. Students read carefully, annotated dutifully, and composed paragraphs with the kind of concentrated seriousness that schools have long equated with intellectual effort. The teacher was experienced, knowledgeable, and entirely in command of her material. By any conventional measure, the lesson was a success. Yet something in it troubled me, and it took considerable time before I could name precisely what.

At the close of the lesson, the teacher asked several students to share what they had written. The paragraphs were structurally competent: quotations embedded, techniques identified, effects observed and recorded. Everything, technically, in its proper place. However, when she pressed one student further, asking him simply to explain in his own words what he thought the writer was doing, the answer dissolved into hesitation and retrieval. He could reproduce the form of literary analysis. He could not yet inhabit it. The writing, it became clear, had preceded the thinking rather than emerging from it.

That observation planted a question I have been working through ever since. If a student can produce the correct written form without having genuinely interpreted the text, what exactly has been taught? And if reading and writing are developed in sustained isolation from spoken thought, what essential cognitive work is being quietly omitted? 

I began to understand, gradually and with increasing conviction, that literary understanding cannot fully develop in silence alone. Before students can write analytically, they must learn to think dialogically; before they can craft a reasoned argument in prose, they must learn to test, defend, interrogate and articulate ideas through speech. In other words, they need oracy, and they need it to be taught with the same seriousness and deliberate attention that we bring to writing itself.

The term oracy carries a longer and more intellectually distinguished history than many practitioners assume. It was coined in 1965 by the British educational researcher Andrew Wilkinson, who argued that speaking and listening had been 'shamefully neglected' in formal education and deserved the same rigorous pedagogical attention as literacy and numeracy. Wilkinson's intervention was not merely terminological. By constructing a precise linguistic parallel to literacy (and numeracy), he was advancing an epistemological claim: that spoken language was not a peripheral social accomplishment but a legitimate and consequential object of teaching, and a foundational condition for learning.

The word "oracy" was coined in 1965 in connection with the work of a research team on speech in the Birmingham University School of Education. It was felt necessary to have a term for the skills of listening and speaking which would be parallel to "literacy" for the skills of reading and writing. Indeed, it was indicative of the unimportant part played by the "orate" skills in thinking about education in the past that no such term existed. That the word has come into use so quickly suggests that it is filling a genuine gap in our vocabulary. (Wilkinson, 1968, p. 743)

That claim, articulated six decades ago, has acquired renewed and pressing force in contemporary British education. Organisations such as Voice 21 and Oracy Cambridge have argued with considerable persuasiveness that oracy should be understood not merely as the functional ability to speak but as the capacity to articulate ideas with precision, to develop understanding through dialogue, and to engage meaningfully and critically with others through sustained spoken communication. 

Their frameworks further establish that oracy comprises interdependent physical, linguistic, cognitive and social-emotional dimensions, all of which require deliberate instruction rather than hopeful expectation. The concept has migrated from the margins of curriculum thinking toward something approaching its centre, though the journey remains unfinished.

Before oracy can be defended as a classroom methodology, it is worth stepping back to observe something that ought to be self-evident yet is frequently overlooked in educational planning: spoken language is the primary medium of human life.

Long before students are required to produce an analytical essay, they are asked to negotiate, to persuade, to articulate distress, to request what they need, to narrate experience, to account for their decisions and intentions. Oracy is the bedrock of social relationship and civic participation, of professional engagement and the capacity to hold a position in public discourse and defend it with clarity and intellectual honesty. 

It is also, and this carries particular significance for English teachers, the medium through which identity is formed and performed. How we speak, and with what assurance and precision we speak, shapes profoundly how others receive us and, over time, how we come to understand ourselves.

English teaching, at its most purposeful, has always comprehended that it is not merely preparing students for examination performance. It is forming persons: persons capable of inhabiting language thoughtfully, of reading the social world as acutely as the literary page, of contributing to communities that depend on articulate, honest and considered communication.

Oracy belongs at the heart of that formation, not solely because it strengthens academic outcomes, though the evidence persuasively suggests it does, but because the capacity to think and speak well is among the most enduring and consequential gifts that a sustained education can bestow.

The most significant intellectual argument for oracy in English is not pedagogical but cognitive: spoken language is not simply a vehicle for displaying thought that has already formed in private. It is one of the principal means by which thought acquires its shape in the first place.

Here the influence of Lev Vygotsky remains irreplaceable. His sociocultural theory proposed that higher-order cognition is inherently social in its origins and develops through interaction before it becomes internalised as individual mental capacity. Spoken dialogue, in this account, is not educational decoration but cognitive infrastructure. Students frequently arrive at genuine understanding not following a period of private deliberation, but in the very act of speaking, hesitating, reformulating and responding to another mind. The conversation is not evidence of thinking already done; it is thinking in progress.

This insight was refined and extended in the classroom research of Neil Mercer, whose meticulous studies of educational discourse describe genuinely productive talk as the joint creation of knowledge. Mercer's concept of exploratory talk is particularly illuminating for the English teacher: learners build understanding collaboratively by offering tentative interpretations, pressing gently on each other's assumptions, requesting clarification, and refining the texture of meaning in response to the contributions of others. The educational value lies not in polished oral performance, not in the articulate student who sounds impressive, but in the visible and sometimes halting construction of reasoning. Students learn because they talk, not merely while they talk.

Robin Alexander's decades of comparative research into classroom discourse sharpens this further. His work on dialogic teaching demonstrates with considerable rigour that talk of genuine educational value does not emerge spontaneously from a permissive classroom atmosphere. It must be deliberately planned, carefully scaffolded and consistently sustained. Productive dialogue requires precisely framed questions, accountable listening, explicit modelling of analytical response, and sufficient intellectual challenge to prevent discussion collapsing into the exchange of unsupported opinion. These are demanding conditions to create and maintain. They are also, I have found, among the most rewarding dimensions of English teaching.

One of the most important distinctions to establish in any serious discussion of oracy is that fluency is not synonymous with it. A native English speaker who enters secondary school communicating with evident confidence in social contexts may nonetheless arrive with severely restricted academic oral language, without the vocabulary of interpretive uncertainty, the register of reasoned disagreement, or the syntactic suppleness to qualify a claim, suspend a judgement, or acknowledge competing readings of a text. 

The language of literary and analytical discourse, constructions such as arguably, one might infer, the deliberate ambiguity here appears to serve, alternatively one could contend, constitutes a specialised intellectual dialect, and it is one that most students have not encountered in the environments in which they have grown up, regardless of their mother tongue.

Native-speaking students often possess conversational fluency without analytical precision. They can communicate comfortably in everyday registers, yet many lack the rhetorical and interpretive language indispensable for academic dialogue: the cautious qualification, the speculative inference, the adversative turn, the evidential claim. 

They know English socially, but not yet intellectually. Deliberate oracy instruction provides the bridge between informal verbal confidence and disciplined academic reasoning, and it does so in a medium that permits revision and risk in a way that written performance rarely affords.

For multilingual learners and students for whom English is an additional language, spoken interaction performs an even more foundational and transformative role. In second-language contexts, students require repeated and purposeful opportunities to rehearse syntax aloud, activate vocabulary in conditions of genuine communicative need, negotiate meaning with interlocutors, and develop confidence in pronunciation and register before written sophistication becomes fully accessible. 

Cambridge Assessment has similarly observed that in multilingual classrooms, learning through oracy frequently accelerates linguistic fluency because language is acquired through purposeful and dialogic use rather than through passive recognition of forms. Both groups, then, need oracy, though for distinct reasons and in forms that must be thoughtfully differentiated. The English classroom is uniquely positioned to provide it.

The practical question, for any teacher persuaded by the argument above, is what deliberate oracy instruction looks like when it is built systematically into English teaching. The honest answer is that it does not resolve into any single technique or procedure. It resembles, rather, a coherent set of principled decisions about how a classroom community uses spoken language, and those decisions accumulate over time into a distinctive intellectual culture.

Productive classroom talk does not emerge from noise. It emerges from design.

Structured interpretive dialogue, whether through a Socratic seminar, a fishbowl discussion, or a community of philosophical enquiry, provides a framework within which students engage with texts collectively, building upon and interrogating each other's readings rather than simply responding to teacher prompts. 

Exploratory talk before writing tasks furnishes students with the cognitive space to form and test ideas in a medium that does not yet demand the permanence and precision of the written sentence. Think-pair-share, deployed with genuine intellectual purpose rather than as procedural courtesy, ensures that every student has shaped a contribution before it is offered to a wider audience. Accountable talk structures, formulations such as I want to extend what she argued, I would take issue with that reading on the grounds that, I remain genuinely uncertain, but my current position is, provide linguistic scaffolding for the moves of academic dialogue without constraining or predetermining the thought itself.

Live authorial commentary, in which a teacher composes in real time on a shared screen while narrating the cognitive process aloud, makes the interior life of a writer visible and audible in a way that no static written model can fully approximate. Extended wait time, the deliberate and unhurried pause following a genuinely demanding question, teaches students through the teacher's sustained example that serious questions warrant serious thought and that speed of response is not a dependable index of intellectual depth.

These are not isolated activities. They are expressions of a single conviction: that spoken language, when structured and purposeful, constitutes a primary site of intellectual development in English.

The educational case for oracy is, by now, both substantial and increasingly resistant to dismissal. Oral language development is among the most robustly evidenced interventions available to schools: the Education Endowment Foundation consistently rates structured oral language programmes at an average of five to six months of additional measurable academic progress, with particularly pronounced and sustained effects for learners from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The benefits are richly layered. Linguistically, students who engage regularly in structured academic dialogue develop more expansive vocabulary, more syntactically sophisticated written expression, and greater confidence in deploying the evaluative and qualifying language that examination assessors recognise and reward. Cognitively, exploratory talk, in Mercer's sense, cultivates precisely the quality of sustained reasoning that solitary, silent study rarely generates. Socially and emotionally, a classroom culture grounded in genuine dialogue nurtures attentive listening, collaborative intellectual resilience, and the courage to challenge a position without dismissing the person who holds it, capacities whose significance extends well beyond the school gates.

Student surveys conducted within oracy-rich schools in England indicate that learners themselves perceive meaningful improvements in their capacity to explain ideas, listen actively, and participate confidently in learning communities. These perceptions matter, because they confirm what many experienced teachers have long sensed through observation: voice is not merely expressive. It is developmental.

The history of oracy as an educational concept establishes that this is an idea with serious, well-founded intellectual credentials. The reality of human experience confirms that spoken language is not a school subject but the fundamental medium through which life is negotiated, understood, and shared. The accumulating body of pedagogical research demonstrates that deliberate, structured oracy teaching produces meaningful and replicable gains in vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing quality, critical reasoning, and personal confidence. And the classroom, my own and those of the many colleagues who have committed themselves to this work, provides continuing testimony that when students are genuinely given the conditions to think aloud, to argue with precision and care, and to inhabit uncertainty without retreating into formula, something consequential and lasting shifts in their relationship with literature, with language, and with themselves.

Writing is often the final and most polished manifestation of thought. But spoken language is where much of that thought first acquires its shape, encounters resistance, and achieves clarity. Through sustained and purposeful discussion, students discover not only what they already know but what they do not yet understand; not only what they can say but how ideas are transformed when exposed to other minds.

The English classroom, then, should not be a place where language is only read and recorded in disciplined silence. It should be a place where language is lived: where students learn that interpretation is inherently collaborative, that uncertainty is intellectually generative rather than shameful, and that thought grows more precise and more honest when it is genuinely voiced.

In English teaching, oracy is not an accessory to literacy. It is one of its deepest and most indispensable foundations. To give a student the words to express what she truly means, with exactness and intellectual honesty, in the full texture of what she thinks and feels, is to give her something that written assessment can register only partially and approximately. It is the beginning of a voice. And an English classroom that does not make the cultivation of that voice its most serious and sustained business has, I would argue, profoundly misunderstood what the subject is for.

Notes:

Alexander, R.J. (2004) Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. 1st edition. York: Dialogos. (Subsequently revised through five editions, with the 5th edition published 2017 by Dialogos, York.)

Alexander, R.J. (2020) A Dialogic Teaching Companion. London: Routledge.

Education Endowment Foundation (2025) Teaching and Learning Toolkit: Oral Language Interventions. London: EEF. Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/oral-language-interventions 

Edwards, D. and Mercer, N. (1987) Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom. London: Routledge.

Mercer, N. (1995) The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk Amongst Teachers and Learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Mercer, N. (2000) Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. London: Routledge.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Thought and Language. Translated by E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilkinson, A., Davies, A. and Atkinson, D. (1965) Spoken English. Educational Review Occasional Publications, No. 2. University of Birmingham.

Wilkinson, A. (1965) 'The Concept of Oracy', Educational Review, 17(4), pp. 11–15.

Wilkinson, A. (1968) 'Oracy in English Teaching', Elementary English, 45(6), pp. 743–747.