heart of heartlands lessons

Even better if:

‘You need to use subject specific words in your answer’

‘You need to write in more detail’

‘You need to check your SPaG’

How many of us have head these before?

In an age where students academic abilities are judged on examinations alone, it can be easy to forget the importance of good oracy. As Alex Quigley writes on his blog, The Confident Teacher, “Even a rudimentary understanding of child language acquisition will spell out that oracy is the very foundation for successful reading and writing”. Good oracy leads to higher order thinking skills and deeper understanding. It also enables students to develop their reasoning and evaluation skills. These are skills we all want our students to obtain.

What does good oracy look-like?

‘Sweat the Small Stuff’

On average a child in a deprived area speaks no more than 4 words a lesson. Every word counts. Insist students answer questions in full sentences, both in and out of the classroom. Ban sentences starting with ‘basically’ or ‘so’! Correction of the written word is as important as the spoken word.

Word Banks

Building student knowledge of subject specific words is essential for every subject teacher. Just because they wrote the words down last week doesn’t always mean they’ll remember them this week! Start lessons by checking their memory, complete spelling tests, ask students to highlight new words they’ve learnt each lesson and encourage students to sound out sentence. The more confident students become saying words, the more confident they’ll become applying them in their writing.

Debates

Plan time for structured and academic talk, before extended writing begins. It can be nerve-racking setting up debates, you feel as you might lose control or the dreaded fear creeps in of a lesson without! Give students the tools to be successful speakers, by providing word banks and connectives. You’d be surprised how much students will be able to write after a class debate.

As teachers we always correct the written word and we can intervene early by checking the spoken word and model good standard English, because it really is ‘good to talk’.