Learning to talk involves developing a pupil’s listening skills as well as spoken language. Attentive listening is a skill without which there can be a complete breakdown in communication in the classroom. As teachers we must explicitly model and teach this to pupils. Sinek says there are five types of listening. The minimum we should …
Presentational talk enables pupils to learn to talk effectively, developing their spoken language in more formal situations such as a presentation or debate. Effective presentational talk can be guided by Voice 21 and Cambridge University’s framework that outlines 4 strands that make up good talk: physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional elements. In order …
It is so important to develop pupils’ vocabulary. Alex Quigley states that pupils need to acquire over 50,000 words to access their GCSEs. Indeed, the EEF Literacy reports state that teachers must provide explicit vocabulary instruction in every subject, use effective approaches to help students remember new words and prioritise teaching tier 2 and 3 …
In order to support embedding oracy in the classroom, insert these icons into your lesson slides, not only will it reduce cognitive load, but it will also make you think about the different strategies you may be using to improve pupils’ oracy. Oracy_icons
Here you can find an overview of one school’s approach to developing exploratory talk. Oracy1_HO
UK lesson studies show that over 60% of questions teachers ask are factual rather than procedural, speculative or process-orientated. Over 70% of children’s own responses were also found to be 3 words or fewer. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) developed the Initiation – Response – Feedback framework. If followed, this framework allows us not only to …
Another way to encourage exploratory talk is using talking points. If we want pupils to talk effectively, we need to give them decent things to talk about! Give some consideration to those topics within your curricula that are particularly interesting ‘talking points’ or those that evoke thought/debate. Another example of a good talking point, might …
Talking frames can be used to promote exploratory talk. This includes using a range of prompts or questions to deepen pupils’ dialogue and give them a focus for their discussions. Strategies such as Agree, Build, Challenge question stems can help pupils to challenge one another’s’ thoughts, ‘But, because, so’ is a technique used to encourage …
Exploratory talk is when children are given the opportunity to develop, challenge and build upon their knowledge and understanding through sustained dialogue. They learn through talking. Just like when designing a task, good quality talk can require scaffolding. By using sentence stems to support pupils’ responses, the quality of talk is elevated. Below you will …
In the 1990s, a study by SLANT outlined for talk to be productive and purposeful, children should be guided by a set of talk rules. If rules for talk are made explicit, visible and spoken (rather than implicit, invisible and unspoken), the talk time will be more productive: pupils are less likely to become off …