Finding your voiceMastery of spoken language is a skill children need in their lives today and as they grow up. They need it for learning effectively in the classroom and for conducting their lives outside school. They will need it to have a happy and fulfilled social life as adults and to drive their success in work. As the Plowden Report noted nearly fifty years ago, our schools need to be teaching students to speak, at the least, 'with fluency, vigour ... and clarity of meaning' [1965].
Oracy - a subject at schoolVoice 21 is developing a an oracy curriculum, for use in dedicated, timetabled oracy lessons which teach students to become successful, powerful speakers. The curriculum documents will be available on a purpose-built website, alongside a searchable, open-source resource-bank for teachers.
Oracy - 'not a subject' at schoolIn-depth questioning by teachers, productive discussions between students and high-quality classroom talk are effective ways to learn and are appropriate to any subject. An 'oracy culture' in schools can be introduced in a small way using simple strategies for encouraging children to think before they speak (such as reading the register in an unexpected order) and one-off events (such as 'No Pens-Day Wednesday') - or schools can make a cross-curricular commitment to oracy as what Andrew Wilkinson (who coined the word 'oracy') called 'a condition of learning for all subjects, a state of being in which the whole school must operate'. The educational, 'knock-on' benefits of oracy were recognised more recently by the expert panel for the National Curriculum Review, who wrote: 'there is a compelling body of evidence that highlights a connection between oral development, educational development and educational attainment'. Some of the reading which the panel found compelling is set out here.
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