What is oracy?
“Oracy is articulating ideas, developing understanding and engaging with others through speaking, listening and communication.”
At Newton Poppleford Primary School, we want all of our children to be effective communicators, we place an emphasis on enabling children to find their voice and use it with confidence. We feel that by explicitly teaching vocabulary and supporting learners in their understanding we build children’s clarity, confidence and competence. Spoken communication (oracy) skills are taught throughout our curriculum and our classrooms are talk-rich environments.
Oracy in Newton Poppleford lessons
All children are expected to talk in all lessons and teachers provide resources and scaffolds to help them do this. We learn through talking in all subjects and become better at reading, writing, maths and all other subjects because we regularly discuss our learning. Children are helped with talking sentence stems as well as the talking roles - instigator, clarifier, prober, challenger, builder and summariser. We talk in pairs, trios and small groups throughout the day, and learn to become as skilful at listening as we are at talking.
Through our high quality oracy education, our children learn through talk and to talk. Oracy enables children to express their thoughts, feelings, understanding and ideas fluently. It also helps them to clarify their thinking and to understand new concepts.
In our school we believe:
- Explicitly and progressively teaching oracy skills builds the capacity for our children to use speech, express their thoughts and communicate with others as outlined in the four strands of the Oracy Framework.
- Teaching improves Oracy and Oracy improves learning.
- Effective Oracy teaching helps children build understanding and develop critical thinking skills
- Oracy is crucial for the development of a deep understanding of vocabulary and wide lexicon.
- Oracy is the responsibility of every teacher and the entitlement of every child.
We utilise the work of voice 21 to create our bespoke framework which has four strands:
