The Curriculum Assessment Review, published in November 2025, flagged up Oracy as a key area for development, in the wake of Sir Keir Starmer’s public commitment to giving it a higher profile in school learning. The CAR recommended that an ‘Oracy Framework’ be developed to support teachers in introducing Oracy into the curriculum. The government response to the CAR supported the greater emphasis on Oracy and confirmed the intention to create an Oracy Framework. Oracy is flagged up in the DfE response not only across the curriculum but also in subject English.
The new acknowledgement by government of the central role of talk in student learning comes in the wake of several initiatives on talk by, among others, Voice 21 and the Oracy Education Commission, led by Geoff Barton, following on from an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Oracy.
So much has been said and written about Oracy over the past few months that it can be hard for teachers to work out what’s most important – what should one hold onto as essential for a route forward. In this short piece, I’m aiming not to persuade anyone of the value of talk – that’s done very well elsewhere – nor to give research evidence that underpins this, but rather to pull out some ‘big picture’ strands to help orientate English teachers to what matters most. Perhaps this will also be helpful to the policymakers and writers of the National Curriculum for English, to ensure that the most important aspects of Oracy don’t get lost, over-simplified or distorted in the process of being translated into policy.
Here are 10 key things worth keeping in focus:
- Talk in English is not just about learning how to talk – it’s also about learning through talk, and learning about talk. The three-legged stool might be a useful metaphor for this, because without all three legs, the stool is not an effective seat. It topples over! Each of the three elements plays its part, and crucially, each relates to the other. They are not separate but deeply intertwined. If you only do performative talk and focus on improving talk, you are denying students one of the most valuable and extensive contexts for developing these very capabilities – the deep knowledge and experience developed in subject learning. If you forget that talk can be nurtured, supported and improved, by students learning how to handle ideas and share thinking, then the quality of their talk for learning may be diminished. And if you don’t teach them about the nature of spoken language, then there may be all kinds of misunderstandings about some fundamental differences between speech and writing, and what high quality talk consists of in different contexts.
- Subjects differ, and English is a fundamentally dialogic subject. The whole edifice of English literary studies would collapse if everyone agreed about texts and could come up with definitive, once and for all, interpretations. Criticism of Shakespeare has continued to thrive decade after decade because people disagree, and come up with fresh and different angles and interpretations. The book reviewing world, the thriving book group culture and the very desire to talk about books in communities of readers are all dependent on ‘dissensus’ as well as consensus (Professor Bob Eaglestone). Fully fledged arguments on paper are developed in talk and allow for the construction of more fully formed interpretations.
- Talk is for thinking. Exploratory talk helps individuals articulate existing thoughts and develop new ones. It also helps students to ‘interthink’, (Professor Neil Mercer), to think better together, building on each others’ ideas. Self-explanation and explaining to others are both well-evidenced aspects of how students can deeply embed and extend their understanding of subject content and ideas.
- Frameworks and grids for talk have some dangers in the same way that frameworks for writing have. They need to be treated with caution. Having a talk framework that everyone uses is not the definitive route to better talk, nor does it guarantee development. If anything, if it becomes a routine checklist, it can have the very opposite effect. Developing strong classroom talk can often be tracked and assessed in other ways, by looking at the broader outcomes of talk. For instance, did classes where talk is embedded produce better writing on texts? Did students engage with the texts more and express more enjoyment of them? Did their memory of texts improve? Were they more confident in using subject-related vocabulary because they had heard and used it multiple times in talk contexts?
- Talk is deeply related to identity and confidence. The way you talk expresses who you are. So, it’s vital for us to be thoughtful about the way we respond to student talk – recognising that there are strengths in many ways of speaking, and many varieties of English across a range of contexts. Students’ home languages or additional languages, their accents and dialects are a rich resource and cause for celebration, investigation and reflection. They are a set of vital foundations upon which all further language development can be built. You don’t usually dig up the foundations in order to build a strong and stable house. And in the case of spoken language, it can be a house of many different rooms. Students talking together informally to develop a piece of writing, or doing a rap contest, or making a speech in an assembly, or discussing a text in whole class discussion, or telling a personal anecdote or engaged in formal debating, or doing an improvisation as the start of writing a scene in a play, will be using spoken registers in very different but equally valuable and legitimate ways.
- Great classroom dialogue doesn’t have to be glitzy and glamorous. It doesn’t have to be hugely complicated and take up whole lessons. It can be simple, small-scale and emerge from very small tweaks to practice. Martin Nystrand, who did substantial and influential research on dialogic learning, talks of ‘dialogic spells’ (the American phrase) or what we in the UK would call ‘dialogic episodes’. This might be just a short period where students can share thoughts on something that’s been introduced, or an idea that needs unpicking. One of the very best drivers for genuine dialogue, is a very simple and small shift in the teacher’s role in questioning and orchestrating classroom discussion, from the IRE pattern to a more dialogic one. Nystrand talks of the importance of teacher questions being ‘authentic’, the kind of question that genuinely needs thought to answer it, and stresses the importance of ‘uptake’, in other words how the teacher takes up a students’ answer and makes it part of a more developed dialogue. Phrases like ‘Tell me more…’ or ‘But what if I said…? Or ‘How does that relate to…’ will develop the dialogue, where only using phrases like ‘Yes, that’s right’ or ‘Good answer’ simply close it down.
- Great talk doesn’t hinge on one or two repetitive strategies. With the renewed interest in classroom talk, including from some who in the past have dismissed it and denied its value, a few very limited talk strategies have appeared and been endlessly discussed. They risk sucking all the oxygen out of the room, limiting the discussion of oracy to fine-tuned versions of these, rather than the bigger, broader, more generous possibilities for the classroom. Hands up/hands down, cold-calling, think-pair-share have received huge amounts of attention. Which is best? Exactly how long should they think-pair-share for? As our publication for teachers English Allsorts shows there are multiple strategies and variations on strategies. The key thing is matching a strategy to the underlying purposes of the lesson, adapting it to the content and the context, being flexible enough to adjust timings and detail in response to what one sees and hears. So, for example, just imagining that think-pair-share is your chosen approach, would it perhaps be better as think-pair-new pair-new pair-share for discussion of a challenging text? Or, perhaps, for working on ideas for a new piece of writing it might be pair-new-pair-think-write. Or write-pair-re-write-share?
- Listening is as important as talking, and equal shares of talk time isn’t necessarily a complete and accurate measure of how much individual students are learning through talk. In small group discussion, a student can sometimes be very quiet at first, and listening carefully. They might then make a highly apposite, insightful contribution that takes the whole group’s thinking forward. I have witnessed this in action and, in fact, we have a great example in our video archive. Here quantity of contributions matters much less than the fact that the student was listening intently, thinking hard and formulating his ideas ready for sharing.
- Giving up on good classroom dialogue about the subject isn’t (or shouldn’t be) an option. We don’t say we’ll stop teaching geometry because students find it hard, or won’t teach them to write analytical essays because they’re too difficult. We shouldn’t feel that we can abandon talk because it can, for some students, be hard to do well. All the more reason for persisting and finding ways of supporting them to do it well, and see its benefits. Voice 21, Oracy Cambridge and others have supportive strategies for setting ground rules, helping students to understand how to talk well with each other, and helping the teacher to develop their own confidence in making that happen.
- Teacher listening is also very important. Talk for Learning in English depends on teachers being attentive to what’s being said, picking up on cues, probing more deeply, and working out next questions, or contributions in the light of what the students have been saying. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of talk in English classrooms, and one that deserves a lot more attention in CPD. It can be supported by jointly watching videos of classroom interactions to explore what’s happening, what the teacher is doing, opportunities seized and ones missed, and so on.
Other EMC Curriculum Think Pieces
EMC Thinking About Curriculum - An Introduction
The Future of English Language at KS3 + KS4
Standard(ised) English - An EMC Think Piece
