Oracy at Willowcroft 

At Willowcroft, oracy is built into our curriculum, teaching and learning and wider school life. We aim to set children up for success in school and life and having good oracy skills means children have a greater chance of success. Examples of high-quality oracy education should be seen in all curriculum areas and should enable children to learn both through talk and to talk.

There are wo types of talk seen in our classrooms: exploratory talk and presentational talk. Exploratory talk focuses on children to work together to solve problems. The speaker shares their own ideas and listens to the thoughts of others. Presentational talk focuses on presenting material and meeting the needs of an audience.

There are four oracy skills we aim for children to develop:

• Physical
• Linguistic
• Cognitive
• Social and Emotional 

Talk happens naturally in classrooms, but we encourage our staff to use the following teaching elements to ensure the talk good quality.

The Listening Ladder

The ladder orders various listening skills in terms of complexity. Teachers will refer to the skills when teaching, using it to support students to reflect on their discussion and set targets for which skills they have and which they want to reach. The listening ladder is displayed in all classrooms.

The skills are:

• Summarising the speaker’s ideas
• Asking questions to dig deeper
• Asking questions to clarify understanding
• Reacting and refocusing
• Offering nods or short words of encouragement
• Giving eye contact to the speaker
• Being calm and still
• Giving 100% of their focus to the person speaking.

Discussion Guidelines

All classrooms will set their own rules for what they want to see during talk time in their classroom. Every class will have different guidelines depending on the needs of the children.

Teacher Talk Tactics

There are 8 key skills that support teachers to model and support effective talk in their classrooms:

Instigate: Present an idea or open a new line of enquiry.

Probe: Dig deeper, ask for evidence or justification of ideas.

Challenge: Disagree or present an alternative argument.

Clarify: Asking questions to make things clearer and check your understanding.

Summarise: Identify and recap main ideas.

Build: Develop, add to or elaborate on an idea.

Model: Articulate the thought processes underpinning talk.

Mark: Highlight an important idea or type of contribution.

Student Talk Tactics 

Teachers will introduce these with the children after they have worked on the teacher talk tactics.

Groupings

Children will be trained in how to sit and work in groups. The skills on the listening ladder will be referred to. If children are working in a small group, their body positioning in relation to each other is key and this will be taught. Teachers will often change 'talk partners' to help develop the four oracy skills.