What is a real story? Investigating the perceptions of Key Stage One children

This small‐scale piece of research stemmed from a larger study on oral storytelling and the responses of children to stories told and read to them. In the larger study several children expressed preferences for stories from picture books, as told stories were not real stories. This concept of real stories and what constitutes a real story in the eyes of an infant child, aged between five and seven years, is what led to the basis of the research. One hundred and thirty‐five children between the ages of five and seven years old were involved in the research. The investigation was conducted in three different schools in South Wales, UK. It was hoped that the research would give some insights into the literacy habits of children today. The children were asked some basic questions about home practices relating to storytelling and story‐reading and about preferences in relation to oral stories and picture books. Finally they were asked if they thought oral tales were real stories. This essay gives an overview of some of the literacy practices of the children and deliberates on their comments as they wrestle with the concept of a real story.     

Finding Voice: Debating in Secondary School English

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the place of debating, talk and group work in the Secondary English classroom. It discusses the ways in which pupils in one student teacher’s year 7 class thrive in the dialogic classroom against the backdrop of curricular and attitudinal change. It considers the importance of talk and debate amongst the ‘communities of practice’ in schools and universities in empowering teachers to challenge and navigate policies, theories and practices. In exploring the role of play, student experiences and different forms of talk, this essay highlights their vital importance in relation to teaching and learning in English and in the formation of English teachers.     

Speaking Subjects: the Development of a Conceptual Framework for the Teaching and Learning of Spoken Language

Although the National Curriculum demands a wide range of speaking and listening activities in the primary classroom and the National Oracy Project has stimulated a rich variety of empirical work by teachers on children's spoken language, there is still an underdeveloped conceptual framework to the primary oracy curriculum as a whole. This article argues that the recent SCAA (School Curriculum and Assessment Authority) Exemplification of Standards booklet and video sent to every primary school in the country only raises once again some of these unresolved conceptual issues. It attempts to begin to construct a useful conceptual framework for classroom oracy using different concepts which help to frame the familial culture of the young child, the oral culture of the media and the cognitive and rational culture of school discourse.     

Speaking, listening and learning: a rationale for the Speaking and Listening Profile

Schools have often not recognised the basis for literacy that oracy provides, but with the issuing of the recent package for speaking and listening to schools, Speaking, Listening, Learning, the tide is now beginning to turn. However, many schools still have not set up any developmentally sequenced structure for assessment in this strand of English. Realising this need, Dorothy Latham has designed such a profile, based on the criteria given in the official package, but with useful additions, showing clear definitive levelling in an easy‐to‐use format. Schools have been consulted and continue to trial its use.     

An oracy assessment toolkit: Linking research and development in the assessment of students' spoken language skills at age 11-12

This article describes the development of a set of research-informed resources for assessing the spoken language skills (oracy) of students aged 11-12. The Cambridge Oracy Assessment Toolkit includes assessment tasks and procedures for use by teachers, together with a unique Skills Framework for identifying the range of skills involved in using talk in any specific social situation. As we explain, no comparable, 'teacher-friendly' instrument of this kind exists. Underpinning its development is the argument that teaching children how to use their first or main language effectively across a range of social contexts should be given higher priorityv in educational policy and school practice, and that the development of robust, practicable ways of assessing oracy will help to achieve that goal. We explain how the Toolkit has been developed and validated with children and teachers in English secondary schools, and discuss its strengths and limitations.     

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

This paper describes research that explored the question of whether or not it is possible to characterise and teach a single type of educationally productive talk. We analysed and compared the quality of children's interactional strategies when jointly working on a reasoning task and a psycholinguistic task. The latter involved writing an integrated summary of three related texts. Sixth grade primary school children (11–12 years old) solved these two tasks as pre- and post-tests before and after training in the use of ‘Exploratory Talk’ (ET) to think together and argue as well as in strategies for producing summaries. After training, children improved substantially in the use of ET when solving the reasoning but not the psycholinguistic task. However, using ethnography of communication methods to analyse the talk further around the latter task revealed that both the number and quality of communicative events and acts increased importantly. These changes were accompanied by a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries produced. These findings suggest that the requirement for explicit reasoning in the definition and analysis of ET may be task dependent. To account for the common features of the educationally productive talk in the two settings, we propose the more inclusive concept of co-constructive talk to characterise the inter-subjective orientation, social ground rules and communicative actions that support effective collaboration, co-ordination and creativity.     

Young Children Talking: An investigation into the personal stories of Key Stage One infants

This is a small-scale piece of research undertaken in two mixed-age infant classrooms in an inner city multicultural primary school with a mixed socio-economic background. The dataset which consisted of 38 recorded stories from 32 children, was collected during a 4-month period. It forms part of a larger study that is still in progress. The research evidence highlights the lack of vivacity in many of the personal stories recounted by the children and possible reasons for this. Analysis of the stories shows some common patterns and reflects on the time given to children, in an increasingly demanding curriculum, for personal storytelling. It concludes that the ability to recount personal history is important for oracy development.     

Collaboration, creativity and the co-construction of oral and written texts

In this paper we explore how primary school children ‘learn to collaborate’ and ‘collaborate to learn’ on creative writing projects by using diverse cultural artefacts—including oracy, literacy and ICT. We begin by reviewing some key sociocultural concepts which serve as a theoretical framework for the research reported. Secondly, we describe the context in which the children talked and worked together to create their projects. This context is a ‘learning community’ developed as part of an innovative educational programme with the aim of promoting the social construction of knowledge among all participants. We then present microgenetic analyses of the quality of the interaction and dialogues taking place as peers worked together on their projects, and how these collaborative processes and uses of the mediational artefacts were taken up by the children. In order to exemplify these processes, our analyses centre on a selection of examples of dialogues, texts and multimedia products of stories created by groups of fourth grade (9-10 years old) children. Overall, the work reveals the dynamic functioning in educational settings of some central sociocultural concepts. These include: co-construction; intertextuality and intercontextuality amongst oracy, literacy and uses of ICT; collaborative creativity; development of dialogical and text production strategies and appropriation of diverse cultural artefacts for knowledge construction.     

语文教学不可谈化口头能力的培养

交际和口才已成为社会对人才素质的要求之一,人们也逐渐意识到口才的重要性,时代呼唤口语训练走进课堂。作为培养语言能力的基础课,语文教学对此承担有不可推卸的责任。     

Going Public: Teaching Students to Speak Out in Public Contexts

Many students find speaking in large group, whole class or ‘public’ contexts intimidating. Over the last 30 years, a model of collaborative talk in small groups has been favoured within English teaching in British education but, with the new generation of GCSE syllabuses, students are required to speak effectively to larger audiences. This article explores what constitutes an effective ‘public’ speaker at GCSE level, and suggests various teaching strategies as starting points.