Why Oracy Has Become Central to English Teaching

Author: Tutor Martin

Date: 11 September 2026

Introduction

Early in my teaching career, I observed a classroom I've never forgotten.

The lesson was well organised, focused, and exactly what formal observation checklists reward. Students read carefully, made notes, and wrote their short essays with real concentration. The teacher knew her subject deeply and guided the class with confidence. By any relevant standards, the lesson was a success. However, something about it bothered me — and it took me a long time to figure out what.

Near the end of the lesson, the teacher asked a few students to read out what they had written. The paragraphs were technically sound: quotes included, techniques named, effects described. On the surface, everything was in place. Then she pushed one student a little further, asking him to explain in his own words what he thought the writer was doing. His answer fell apart into hesitation and guessing.

He could copy the form of literary analysis — but he hadn't truly made it his own. The writing had come before the thinking, not grown out of it.

That moment raised a question I've been exploring ever since. If a student can produce the correct written answer without really understanding the text, what have we actually taught them? And if we teach reading and writing without giving students space to talk through their ideas, what important thinking skills are we leaving out?

Over time, I came to a clear conclusion: before students can write strong analysis, they first need to think out loud — to test ideas in conversation, defend them, question them, and put them into words. In short, they need speaking and listening skills taught as carefully as we teach writing itself.

The History of Oracy as an Educational Concept

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 neglected in formal education and deserved the same rigorous pedagogical attention as literacy and numeracy. Wilkinson put the case for the term itself directly:

"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 argue with considerable persuasiveness that oracy should be understood 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, a broader claim than the mere functional ability to speak. The concept has migrated from the margins of curriculum thinking toward something approaching its centre, though the journey remains unfinished.

"Oracy is to speaking what numeracy is to mathematics or literacy to reading and writing. In short, it’s nothing more than being able to speak and listen well across a range of contexts. It’s about having the vocabulary to say what you want to say and the ability to structure your thoughts so that they make sense to others." (English-Speaking Union)

The Role of Oracy in Human Life Beyond the Classroom

Before we can defend oracy as a method of teaching, we must take a step back and look at something that should be obvious but often gets lost in the mists of planning education: spoken word is the primary medium of human life.

Long before students are asked to produce an analytical essay, they are asked to negotiate, to persuade, to explain when distressed, to ask for what they need, to narrate, to explain their actions and intentions. Oracy is the foundation of social relationship and civic engagement, of professional engagement and the ability to hold a position in the public forum and defend it with intellectual honesty.

It is also, and this is where it is important to English teachers, the medium through which the formation and performance of identity takes place. How we speak and with what assurance and precision, influences enormously how we are received and, over time, how we come to understand ourselves.

English teaching, at its most purposeful, has always understood that it is about preparing people for far more than examination performance. It forms persons: persons who can inhabit language thoughtfully, who can read the social world as acutely as the written word, who can contribute to communities that depend on articulate, honest and considered communication.

Oracy belongs at the heart of that formation. The evidence persuades us that it improves academic results, but a longer claim can be made: the ability to think and speak well is one of the most enduring and valuable gifts that a sustained education can bestow.

What Oracy Actually Does to Thought

The most significant intellectual argument for oracy in English is cognitive rather than merely pedagogical: spoken language does far more than display 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 holds that higher-order cognition is inherently social in origin and develops through interaction before it becomes internalised as individual mental capacity. In this account, spoken dialogue functions as cognitive infrastructure, not educational decoration. Students frequently arrive at genuine understanding in the very act of speaking, hesitating, reformulating and responding to another mind, rather than through a period of private deliberation beforehand. The conversation is thinking in progress, not evidence of thinking already done.

This insight was refined and extended through the classroom research of Neil Mercer, whose meticulous studies of educational discourse portray 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, gently pressing on each other's assumptions, requesting clarification, and refining the texture of meaning in response to others' contributions. The educational value lies in the visible, sometimes halting construction of reasoning, well beyond any polished oral performance from an articulate-sounding student. 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 real rigour that talk of genuine educational value rarely emerges spontaneously from a permissive classroom atmosphere. It calls for deliberate planning, careful scaffolding and sustained attention. Productive dialogue requires precisely framed questions, accountable listening, explicit modelling of analytical response, and sufficient intellectual challenge to keep discussion from 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.

Developing Oracy in English Classrooms: Native and Non-Native Speakers

The first and most vital distinction to make in considering oracy is that between fluency and oracy. Someone may speak fluent English from a very young age, having no difficulty expressing themselves in a social setting, but this does not necessarily mean that their command of spoken academic English is anywhere near as developed. They may not have the same breadth of vocabulary to express interpretive hesitation, or the same level of syntactical flexibility to qualify a statement, withhold a judgment, or simply understand alternative interpretations.

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, well before they know it intellectually. Deliberate oracy instruction provides the bridge between informal verbal confidence and disciplined academic reasoning, 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. The English classroom has the advantage of being able to offer both.

What Oracy Teaching Actually Looks Like

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 resists any single technique or procedure. It resembles, instead, a coherent set of principled decisions about how a classroom community uses spoken language, decisions that accumulate over time into a distinctive intellectual culture.

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, with formulations such as I want to extend that argument, I would take issue with that reading because…, 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 activities share a single conviction: that spoken language, when structured and purposeful, constitutes a primary site of intellectual development in English.

The Benefits of Oracy: What the Evidence Confirms

The educational case for oracy is, by now, both substantial and increasingly difficult to dismiss. Oral language development is among the most robustly evidenced approaches available to schools. The Education Endowment Foundation consistently rates structured oral language programmes as having a positive impact on attainment, with particularly pronounced and sustained benefits for learners from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

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

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

The Oracy Skills Framework by Cambridge

I'd like to show you a real oracy framework so you can gain some deeper knowledge about it. I found The Oracy Skills Framework published on the Cambridge University Press & Assessment website. To keep everything as authentic as possible, I've included two direct quotations, and I've taken the framework's scheme from the original document, The Oracy Skills Framework and Glossary. I'll stop here, as I think this text is fairly straightforward, so you can form your own judgements, opinions, and perspectives.

"Until recently, there was no clear specification of the range of skills that are involved in using spoken language to communicate effectively. The Oracy Skills Framework (as shown below and available online with a glossary) was created by researchers at the University of Cambridge, working with members of School 21 (the first UK school to put oracy firmly into its curriculum)." (Getting started with Oracy)

"The Oracy Skills Framework (OSF) specifies the various skills young people need to develop to deal with a range of different talk situations. The framework has been developed by drawing on available existing resources and research, and in consultation with a range of experts. The OSF is designed to help school leaders, teachers and pupils understand the physical, linguistic, cognitive and social/emotional skills that enable successful discussion, inspiring speech and effective communication." (The Oracy Skills Framework and Glossary, p. 1)

The Oracy Skills Framework

1) Physical

1. Voice

   • Pace of speaking

   • Tonal variation

   • Clarity of pronunciation

   • Voice projection

2. Body Language

   • Gesture and posture

   • Facial expression and eye contact

2) Linguistic

1. 1. • Vocabulary

        • Appropriate vocabulary choice

      • Language

        • Register

        • Grammar

      • Rhetorical Techniques

        • Rhetorical techniques such as metaphor, humour, irony and mimicry

3) Cognitive

1. Content

   • Choice of content to convey meaning and intention

   • Building on the views of others

2. Structure

   • Structure and organisation of talk

3. Clarifying and summarising

   • Seeking information and clarification through questions/ing

   • Summarising

4. Self-regulation

   • Maintaining focus on task

   • Time management

5. Reasoning

   • Giving reasons to support views

   • Critically examining ideas and views expressed

4) Social & Emotional

1. Working with others

   • Guiding or managing interactions

   • Turn-taking

2. Listening and responding

   • Listening actively and responding appropriately

3. Confidence in speaking

   • Self assurance

   • Liveliness and flair

4. Audience awareness

   • Taking account of level of understanding of the audience

Conclusion: Giving Students Their Voice

The history of oracy as an educational concept establishes it as an idea with serious and well-founded intellectual credentials. The reality of human experience confirms that spoken language is one of the fundamental ways through which life is negotiated, understood and shared. An accumulating body of pedagogical research demonstrates that deliberate, structured oracy teaching can produce meaningful gains in vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing quality, critical reasoning and confidence. And the classroom — my own and those of the many colleagues who have committed themselves to this work — provides continuing evidence that when students are genuinely given the conditions to think aloud, argue with precision and care, and inhabit uncertainty without retreating into formula, something consequential shifts in their relationship with literature, language and themselves.

Writing is often the final, most polished manifestation of thought. Spoken language, however, is where much of that thought first takes shape, encounters resistance and achieves clarity. Through sustained, purposeful discussion, students discover not only what they already know but also what they have yet to understand; not only what they can say, but how ideas change when exposed to other minds. The English classroom, then, should be a place where language is lived, not merely read and recorded in disciplined silence. It should be a place where students learn that interpretation is inherently collaborative, that uncertainty is intellectually generative rather than shameful, and that thought becomes more precise and more honest when it is genuinely voiced.

In English teaching, oracy is one of literacy’s deepest and most indispensable foundations. To give students the language to express meaning with precision, intellectual honesty and emotional range is to give them something that written assessment can register only partially. It is the beginning of a voice.

And that, ultimately, is what the English classroom is for: not simply to produce better readers or more accomplished writers, but to develop people who can think carefully, speak thoughtfully, listen seriously and find the confidence to make their voices heard. A classroom that does not make the cultivation of that voice a central part of its work has, I would argue, profoundly misunderstood what the subject is for.

Recommended Publications

• Oracy in English Language Education: Insights from Practice-Oriented Research

• Second Language Oracy Development for Young Learners: Listening, Speaking and Thinking

References

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

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

Cameron, D. (2025). The Trouble with Oracy? In T. F. Wright (Ed.), Oracy: The Politics of Speech Education (pp. 188–200). Cambridge University Press.

Education Endowment Foundation (2025) Teaching and Learning Toolkit: Oral Language Interventions. 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. Routledge.

English-Speaking Union. Available at: https://www.esu.org/

Getting started with Oracy. Cambridge International Education. Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Available at: https://www.cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswor/ 

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

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

The Oracy Skills Framework and Glossary (2020) Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Available at: https://oracycambridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Oracy-Skills-Framework-and-Glossary.pdf

Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Thought and Language. Translated by E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar. 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. 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.

---

If you spot an error, inconsistency, or have a suggestion for improvement, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am only human, and I make mistakes, which I readily admit. Many thanks, Tutor Martin.