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In this edition of ⚗️DistillED, we're looking at oracy: the explicit teaching of speaking and listening as a set of learnable skills. Research suggests that structured student talk, explicitly taught and deliberately organised, improves reasoning, attainment, and learning. Let's go.
In this edition
📊 Do Now: Quick Poll!
How often do students in your lessons talk to each other about the content — not just answer questions — in a typical lesson?
What is Oracy?
Oracy is the ability to use speaking and listening skills effectively across a range of purposes and contexts. It is a set of learnable skills that can be explicitly taught, practised, and improved, in any subject, at any phase.
Voice 21 and Oracy Cambridge developed the Oracy Framework to map those competencies across four interlinked strands:
Physical: The mechanics of how we speak: pace, tonal variation, clarity of pronunciation, voice projection, gesture, posture, facial expression, and eye contact.
Linguistic: The language choices we make: appropriate vocabulary, register, grammar, and the use of rhetorical techniques to convey meaning.
Cognitive: The thinking that underpins talk: selecting and organising content, building on others' ideas, clarifying and summarising, giving reasons, and managing focus and time.
Social and Emotional: The interpersonal dimension: guiding and managing interactions, turn-taking, active listening, confidence in speaking, and awareness of audience.
These four strands do not operate independently. A student who cannot manage their physical delivery will struggle to be heard. A student who lacks linguistic tools will struggle to be precise. A student who has not been taught the social norms of productive dialogue will struggle to build on others' ideas rather than simply wait for their turn. The framework is useful precisely because it makes these distinctions visible, and therefore teachable.
Oracy encompasses two different modes of talk that are often conflated. Most schools currently develop the first and neglect the second. Crucially, both matter:
Presentational Talk is polished, rehearsed, and directed at an audience: a speech, a debate, a structured explanation. It tends to be what people picture when they hear the word oracy. For example, a Year 11 student delivers a prepared argument in a structured class debate on whether social media should be regulated. They have drafted, rehearsed, and refined their position.
Exploratory Talk is tentative, generative, and collaborative: thinking aloud, building on a partner's idea, reasoning through a problem together. It is messier and harder to assess, but it is where much of the learning actually happens. For example, a Year 10 Science teacher asks students to discuss in pairs, before anyone writes anything down, what they think would happen to reaction rate if temperature decreased. Students talk through their reasoning. Several voice misconceptions. Those misconceptions are now visible and correctable.
Here’s a bulletproof list of what oracy IS and IS NOT:
👎 Oracy IS NOT:
A Personality Trait — Students are not simply "good" or "bad" at talking.
A Separate Subject — It is not a bolt-on enrichment activity taught in isolation.
Just Cold Calling — Asking students questions alone is not enough to develop oracy.
Only Debate or Public Speaking — Oracy is much broader than performance or presentation.
A One-Off Initiative — It cannot be developed through a single lesson or after school public speaking clubs.
Just a Social Skill — It is not primarily a pastoral concern; it is central to thinking and learning.
👍 Oracy IS:
A Set of Learnable Skills — Oracy can be explicitly taught and improved through practice.
Embedded in Learning — It is woven into everyday teaching, not added on top of it.
For Every Student — It is about all students talking, not just the confident ones.
Exploratory as Well as Polished — It includes tentative thinking, rehearsal, discussion, and formal presentation.
Built Through Routines — It develops through consistent, structured classroom and whole-school practices.
A Driver of Learning — It strengthens reasoning, vocabulary, and academic attainment.
Why Does Oracy Matter?
There are three main reasons to take oracy seriously, and they are worth keeping separate because they make different kinds of claims. Let’s get into each:
1. Cognition: Talk Improves Thinking
The strongest case for oracy is the evidence that structured classroom talk improves learning.
Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, and Sams (2004) taught primary students to follow ground rules for productive group discussion — everyone participates, contributions are built on rather than dismissed, reasoning is made explicit. Comparing 109 students against a matched control group, they found that the programme produced measurable improvements in language, reasoning, and science attainment. Critically, the gains were not limited to oracy itself. The students got better at thinking.
Furthermore, Howe et al (2019) observed 72 teachers and found that higher-quality group talk — characterised by more exploratory discussion — was associated with stronger Year 6 performance in both Maths and English SATs. More talk did not correlate with better outcomes. More productive, structured talk did.
The mechanism behind these findings is not mysterious. Talk is a generative activity. To explain something aloud, students must retrieve it from memory, organise it into a sequence, and produce it. That process is cognitively demanding in exactly the right ways.
"Exploratory talk is the kind of discussion which enables people to work together as a group to understand and solve a problem. It has to be explicitly taught and practised."
2. Equity: Talk Gives Everyone a Voice
The second argument is one of values rather than evidence. If classroom participation depends solely on volunteers, the same confident students tend to dominate discussion while many others remain silent. In a classroom where the only route to participation is competitive hands-up, the students with the loudest voices, the most social confidence, and the least anxiety about being wrong dominate the talk. Every other student is a spectator. Pair talk structures ensure that every student articulates their ideas. The purpose of cold call is not to replace pair talk but to create accountability for it — so that when students discuss in pairs, they know they may be asked to share.
3. Making Meaning: Talk Is Central to Learning
Finally, talk matters because it is fundamental to how people make sense of ideas. Through discussion, students articulate, test, refine, and connect their thinking. Speaking allows them to hear their own ideas taking shape, while listening exposes them to alternative perspectives that extend and challenge their understanding.
How Do I Use Oracy?
Most teachers already use some form of student talk in lessons. The question is whether the structure around that talk is doing the work it needs to do. Talk without structure tends to be unproductive.
The five steps below address the architecture of classroom talk: how to set up the conditions in which productive talk can happen. Once that architecture is in place, the Talk Tactics developed by Voice 21 that follow give students the language to make the most of it.
Step | Explanation | Example |
|---|---|---|
1. Build a Permanent Pair Structure
| Allocate every student to a named pair — one trio if the numbers require it. Assign each person a label (A and B). The pair is the unit of accountability: when students know they are always working with the same person, the routine becomes automatic. | A Year 9 History teacher seats students in permanent pairs at the start of term. A is always to the left. B always speaks first. The teacher can now say "B, explain the causes to A — ninety seconds" and the structure is already in place. No shuffling, no deciding. |
2. Give Thinking Time Before Talk Time
| Require silence before talk begins. Thinking time prevents discussion from becoming a race between the quickest thinkers. It ensures every student has something worth contributing before they begin speaking. Students who are asked to discuss immediately say the first thing that arrives. Students who have been given thirty seconds of silent thinking say something they have actually thought about. The pause is not empty — it is where retrieval happens. | Before a paired discussion about the themes of a poem, the teacher says "Thirty seconds. No talking yet. Think about what the poem is actually about before you say anything." The paired discussion that follows is noticeably more substantive. |
3. Structure the Question, Not Just the Task
| Vague, unplanned questions produce vague talk. Questions that specify the form of the response — three factors, a claim and a reason, a step-by-step explanation — produce more complete and more cognitively demanding discussions. Use scaffolds or prompts like sentence starters to support. | Instead of "Discuss the experiment," the teacher says: "Explain to your partner, step by step, what happened and why — include the independent variable, the dependent variable, and what you would predict if we changed the temperature." The constraint raises the quality of the talk. |
4. Give Students Something Concrete to Talk About
| Abstract questions asked cold produce thin responses. A stimulus — a short text, an image, a data set, a worked example, a partially completed diagram — gives students something to refer to and reason from. The resource does not replace the thinking; it makes precision possible. | A Year 10 Geography teacher shows a graph of global temperature change before asking pairs to discuss the relationship between human activity and climate patterns. Students point at specific data points. The discussion is precise because the resource makes precision possible. |
5. Build in Accountability
| Students talk more purposefully when they know they may be asked to share. After a paired discussion, cold call two or three pairs — not to catch students out, but to sample the quality of the thinking. Make the cold call feel like an invitation to share something the class should hear. | The teacher listens briefly while students discuss, then cold calls: "Priya, what were you and Marcus discussing about the significance of the Weimar Republic's economic problems?" The pair know this is coming. The accountability raises the quality of the preparation. |
Teaching the Talk Tactics
The team at Voice 21 have developed six Talk Tactics that provide students with a shared language for discussion. Each tactic is a named conversational move, accompanied by sentence stems that can be explicitly taught and applied across subjects and year groups. The aim is to broaden students' conversational repertoire beyond simply taking turns.
Talk Tactic | Purpose | Example Sentence Stem |
|---|---|---|
Instigate | Present an idea or open a new line of inquiry. | "I would like to start by saying..." |
Build | Develop, add to, or elaborate on an existing idea. | "Building on X's idea..." |
Probe | Dig deeper by asking for evidence, reasoning, or examples. | "Why do you think...?" |
Challenge | Disagree respectfully or present an alternative viewpoint. | "I disagree because..." |
Clarify | Check understanding or ask someone to explain further. | "So are you saying...?" |
Summarise | Identify and recap the key ideas from the discussion. | "So far we have talked about..." |
The tactics work best when introduced one at a time rather than all at once. A teacher who spends a week drawing attention to Build moves — asking students to notice when they are adding to an idea rather than starting a new one — will embed that tactic more durably than one who displays all six on a poster and hopes for the best. Over time, the language becomes habitual. Students stop needing the stems and start using the moves naturally.
Talk that every student does is more powerful than talk that a few students perform. The architecture does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be consistent. Pair talk embedded as a daily routine, lesson after lesson, class after class, is worth more than any single oracy event delivered once a term.
— Jamie
If you want more:
👉 Read Cold Calling — how to use cold call as accountability for pair talk rather than a substitute for it
👉 Read Mini-Whiteboards Revisited — the quickest whole-class tool for making thinking visible before and after talk
👉 Read Rehearsal Before Retrieval — on using structured paired talk as a preparation step before writing or formal retrieval
👉 Read The Do Now — how a structured opening routine can make daily talk a habit rather than an event
👉 Get the Participation and Thinking CPD Collection — a complete CPD pack covering the structures and strategies for getting every student thinking and participating, including pair talk, cold call, and questioning routines
👉 Get the Questioning and Participation CPD Collection — resources for designing high-quality questions and building participation structures that work across subjects and year groups
👉 Get the Everyone, Together, Anyone CPD Pack — a focused pack on inclusive whole-class participation, directly relevant to the equity argument for oracy
👉 Get the Inclusive Teaching & Checking Understanding — tools for ensuring all students are actively engaged and that understanding is visible, not assumed
📥 Free Planning Tool
Planning High-Quality Pair Talk
To help you put these ideas into practice, download Planning High-Quality Pair Talk — a practical, evidence-informed lesson planning tool designed to help you structure purposeful classroom discussion. It guides you through the five key planning decisions that underpin high-quality pair talk: building permanent pairs, giving thinking time, structuring the question, providing a discussion stimulus, and building accountability.
⚗️DistillED+ Exclusive Content
This week, ⚗️DistillED+ members get access to an Oracy CPD PowerPoint, a Printable Oracy One-Pager, and an Oracy Strategy Checklist, breaking down how to build purposeful classroom discussion through structured routines, explicit teaching of talk skills, and high-quality pair talk — so oracy becomes an everyday driver of thinking and learning rather than an occasional classroom activity.
