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Oracy in the Classroom: Policy, Pedagogy, and Group Oral Work

ROGER HEWITTND MOIRA A INGH~LLERI Social Science Research Unit, lnstitute of Education, University of London

Currently in the United States, researchers and educators are emphasizing the importance of classroom talkas a means to a particular instructional goal, while in the United Kingdom, speaking and listening skills in themselves are being foregrounded as a site of pedagogic activity. The effect of such legitimation has not been fully investigated however, and in the U.K. setting, it is not always clear what the aims and purposes of a particular oral activity are. Based on observations in six inner-london schools, we consider how such ambiguities of purpose are reflected in official oracy policy, in the design of classroom activities, and at the level of discourse organization.
In the United States, attention is currently being given to the importance of talk and its relationship to thinking and learning in the classroom (Cazden 1988; Dyson 1989; Hynds and Rubin 1990).Of special concern is enculturating students from diverse cultural backgrounds into schoolbased discourse norms in particular content areas such as mathematics and science. Teachers here are being encouraged to include oral group work, discussion, and other forms of classroom talk which support higher-order thinking and collaborative learning. By and large, however, oral work activitiesin U.S. classrooms take place on an ad hoc basis and primarily in schools concerned with innovating within the curriculum. And it is primarily the instrumental role of talk that has been treated as important while little emphasis has been placed on talking skills as in themselves deserving attention. e In the U.K.,ducational concerns for the development of communicative, expressive, and intellectual abilities have led to the conducting and assessment of oral work in English classrooms. There it has been determined that the communicative skills demanded by these activities should be specifically taught to students, and thus oral language itself is foregrounded as a site of pedagogic activity. And this interest in talk has spread beyond English to other core subjects in the national curriculum such as mathematics and science. This article concerns developments in the United l n g d o m with regard to the recent endorsement in their national curriculum of the
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24(4):308-317. Copyright O 1993, American Anthropological Association.

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importance of "speaking and listening skills" referred to in the U.K. as oracy. While there is no comparable curriculum policy here in the U.S., many of the issues and concerns that have been raised by researchers and educators there concerning official oracy policy and practices echo some of our own concerns with respect to the organization and assessment of collaborative activities involving talk in socioculturally diverse classrooms. The development of a national policy-related interest in oracy in Britain has been supported by a convergence of different constituencies of academic interest. These include approaches to oracy as important to individual learning and intellectual development, oral group work as an important aid to group learning, the importance of talk and narrative in children's self-expression, and oracy as a valuable civic attribute related both to the democratic process and to talk in the workplace. From such a variety of interests, the space provided by the concept of oracy may become occupied in a number of ways in terms both of the activities engaged in and of the range of values attached to different speech events. Thus, the kinds of oral language activities which will be developed and monitored by teachers over the next few years will be the product of a confluence of different kinds of input. It still remains to be seen how oral work will be constructed and how what is constructed will relate to the objectives of official policy. This will no doubt be influenced by such things as assessment needs, teaching resources, educational ideologies, local student populations, and teacher-training experience and adaptability. In our own work in six inner-london schools serving communities of different class and ethnic backgrounds, we observed many different practices depending on, among other thngs, teachers' familiarity with and interpretation of the function of oral work in their classrooms. Moreover, much of the oral work we witnessed seemed to represent a convergence of several traditions informed by very different intellectual and ideological approaches to oral language in the classroom. This seems to have created an element of confusion concerning the aims and purposes of talk in schools and, it would appear, may be leading some teachers to set contradictory or unrealizable objectives in at least some aspects of oral work in their classrooms. We would like to expand a little on the traditions that have been evident in oral work in English classrooms in Britain over the years. One of the earliest traditions of oral work, whch we will refer to as the Augustan tradition, has its roots in 19th- and early-20th-century classroom activities. Here emphasis was both on the aesthetics of oral performance, that is, the tradition of the recitation and the performance of dramatic or poetic texts from the canons of English literature (and its offshoot, the elocution class), and on the discursive tradition that involved the class debate or individual talk on a chosen topic, emphasizing logic of argument and clarity of expression.The student of this tradition

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was expected to "echo the voice of high culture" with clear, unambiguous, and preferably eloquent expression. A radical alternative, which we will refer to as the romantic tradition, emerged during the 1%0s and 1970s.The emphasis of this tradition was less on the high culture existing outside of the individual student and far more on the "voice of the child" in a social context. This very different approach to the oral performance was a product of several developments, not the least of which was the dramatic restructuring of British education following World War 11, when the education of the working class received national attention. By the 1960s more and more attention was being paid to the lives and cultures of working-class students. A new concept of oral work emerged in schools, a concept behind which lay the recognition of what children brought with them into the classroom both in the oral forms of their communities and in their languages, dialects, and idioms. It was during t h s period that linguistics and sociolinguistics(in particular, the work of Labov, Hymes, and Halliday) made an enormous impact on English teaching in Britain. The emphasis turned to expressive forms like popular narrative and oral cornrnunication as an activity taking place within face-to-face situations where individuals could draw on a shared community culture. At the same time and within this romantic tradition, there emerged an interest in the role of languageand cognitive development as well. James Britton, drawing on the work of Bruner and Vygotsky, stressed the importance of language to learning (Britton 1970). He, together with Douglas Barnes and Harold Rosen, introduced the idea to teachers of the importance of talkand small-groupwork in their classrooms (Barnes et al. 1969; Barnes 1976; Barnes and Todd 1977).Here, talk and collaborative learning activities were also linked to social slulls and the coopera tive dimension of talk was foregrounded as fundamental. This was an extension of the collectivist interests and concerns that predominated withn this tradition. Recently, Barnes and others have expressed concern that the kinds of group-dynamic and interpersonal skills valued as important aspects of community have been taken over by a conservative voice and the rise in the U.K. of a "new vocationalism" where emphasis on oral skills serves to socialize young people in the values and current needs of the workplace (Barnes 1988). But this is not the only area in whch such "reconstituting" can be said to have occurred. In looking at the rise in interest in oracy through the 1980s, what is most strilung is how very different intellectual traditions and the ideologies that inform them have been borrowed fromand most apparently smoothed out in official policy documents; how vestiges of the Augustan tradition have reappeared; how the voice of sociolinguistics has been incorporated; how expressive "orality" has been given a back seat; and how the intellectual, cognitive benefits of oral work have been foregrounded.

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National-curriculum-policydocuments together with official assessment criteria and testing procedures constitute what must be viewed as a new orthodoxy, what Hewitt has elsewhere termed the new oracy, with respect to how oral communication within English as a school subject is constructed (Hewitt 1989).This new orthodoxy includes an interest in a notion of "transactional talk," which is, according to one official document, "spoken language where it is predominantly the content that matters; it is information-related or transactional in its functions and characteristically has a definable purpose" (Department of Education and Science 1989). This interest in transactional talk can be viewed as a product of the more conservative, pragmatic approach to education in Britain which has emerged since the late 1970s.But it has also beenmade possible by the political pliability of the language of sociolinguistics which informs it. If we trace just how transactional talk has managed to dominate the language of official government working reports and documents developing oral work in schools, we find that it relies on terms introduced through sociolinguistics like communicative competence and appropriate ness to purpose and audience. But though the intention behind these terms in Hymes's notion of communicative competence implied genuine purposes arising out of everyday social interaction, in the new oracy these terms are also available as support for the concern that students learn to convey information clearly, concisely, and unambiguously. As one government report states, for example, "communication will have failed if the listener does not discover which platform the train leaves from or how to load the program into the computer" (Department of Education and Science 1989).Hence, the voice of sociolinguistics, which in the sixties and seventies accompanied "expressive orality" and concerns for "hearing the voice of the child," is found in the 1980s harmonizing with the "skills-centered concerns" of those with very different political interests. The actual practices of individual teachers or schools with respect to oral work are, of course, not strictly determined by official policy. And as we suggested earlier, there is a lot of room for interpretation in the new and broadly defined concept of oracy. In our own research, we observed a wide variety of practices depending on the interests, ideologies of language, training, etc. of teachers and subject advisors. What is a concern, however, when several different traditions converge, is whether or not teachers and students are clear on what the aims and purposes of a particular oracy "event" are. In our research, a fairly typical oracy activity combined elements of several traditions. The following examples provide some illustration of this type of convergence. In one small-group activity we observed, four Afro-Caribbean boys discussed the topic of smoking. The context wasagrouporal test in which one boy was responsible for talking for five minutes on a subject and the

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others were expected to listen and then ask questions to which he was expected to respond. In this example, prior to the start of the "test" performance there was a lot of joking about the topic, including comments like "smokin' what." When the test began however, the boy delivered a talk, straight out of an antismoking campaign, on the hazards of smoking. The rest of the boys cooperated (for they too were being tested) by posing relatively unchallenging questions like "Do you approve of smoking in public places?" to which he obligngly responded. In another very different type of group oral activity, we observed two groups of students (one all white and the other all Afro-Caribbean) worlung on a task related to the topic of apartheid in South Africa. These students had been instructed to match different segments of written text taken from a larger story to a photograph and then work out the order of the segments in order to reproduce the whole story. The groups spent the class period reading the segments aloud, following which minimal talking and collaboration took place, just enough to accomplish the task of correctly ordering the story. Such performances raise questions as to what kind of communicative slulls or practices students are expected to acquire through group oral activities, and what exactly teachers can or do assess. For instance, does a group oral test like the one described in our first example allow a teacher to assess a student's ability to research and present information, the ability to present this information clearly and fluently, or the ability to "think on your feet" when asked a question?Or was it merely an exercise in delivering (or listening to) a short speech with little personal investment in the topic-an activity that appears to encourage rather bland, consensual opinions? Likewise, in our example of the groups worlung with the topic of apartheid, the purpose of the task and its relation to the acquisition of oral skills was not immediately clear. For example, did the teacher intend to assess the individual student's reading comprehension or ability to read aloud fluently?Or was the students' ability to work collaboratively in matching pictures to a written text considered of primary concern? Furthermore,this type of activity, which deals with a controversial social issue or current event, raises thequestion of what results when students' engagement with "relevant material" (in the romantic tradition) takes place withn a rather undefined artificial event. In t h s case, a well-intentioned teacher chose the topic of apartheid assuming it to be a meaningful and important issue for the groups to discuss. Instead, what occurred (and we observed this on several occasions) was that a topic like racism became a lund of educational commodity, transformed into a mere vehicle for the assessment of decontextualized oral language practices. The students' reaction was to respond to it as such, and therefore a topic that was supposed to connect for them in some real way became disconnected and regarded as existing outside of themselves.

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Such ambiguities of purpose are clearly reflected at the level of discourse organization. One prevailing ambiguity, as we see it, arises from the pressures to encourage both cooperative group work and "clear" transactional language. In a sense it is a bundle of objectives in which the former is fundamentally derived from actual oral practice while the latter is underpinned by a specific set of literacy notions-"ideological literacy" perhaps (Street 1984)or "essayist literacy" (Scollonand Scollon 1981). These contradictions seem to produce clashes with which the students are forced to deal. We found some indications, for example, that verbal explicitness is often symbolically linked to social distance. It certainly seemed that explicitness was sometimes avoided, even at the expense of mutual understanding, because to be seen not to use sparse, implicit language grounded on the expectation of mutual understanding was to imply a lack of social closeness. The conveying of meaning was thus jeopardized in the interests of not rocking the interactional boat. It is also interesting to note how many of the tests designed by the Assessment of Performance Unit (1984) to measure transactional oral skills involved students sitting on either side of a screen and explaining things to each other, imagining they were only in telephone contact, or otherwise being socially disconnected from each other. There does seem to be an implicit social model that lies behind some of the tangled ideologies of oral work assessment to which both students and oral assessors orient themselves. It may be expressed simply as follows:
f00perahve
'

Transactional explicit/precise distant

Language: Social Relationships:

implicit/vague close

In the setting up of some oral tasks, the contradictory injunction to combine the uncombinable produces considerable tension evident in the discourse produced. We found that commonly the tension was resolved by the students developing their own specialized modality of the "interpersonal" in which the talk was bracketed off from normal intercourse and treated as wholly artificial, with the clear corollary that the identities of the students in interaction and any closeness was not at stake in these performances. This simple solution (obviously the one adopted by the boys in the "smoking" talk alluded to above) does, however, throw up its own problems. In particular the problem of disagreement looms especially large. Under the definition of cooperation, students are encouraged to balance the direct expression of their individual points of view with "tolerance and respect" for the points of view of others. Interactively straightforward disagreement is disprefemed, but students also realize the value of disagreement as a demonstration of the "play of intellect"

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which provides the evidence of "lively" talk. For this reason, disagreement may be both done and not done at the same time-especially where the pedagogc objectives are emphatically present. The following is an example of discursive ambiguity in practice. In the text below, N has just delivered a five-minute talk on "Sport on TV," which he concluded with: ". . . so if there was an individual sports channel, there could be minority sports showing female sports, showing, and uh, mixed sports, showing, uh. I would like to know your views on these points." A second speaker (M) makes a short contribution of which the final sentence is reproduced below. The disagreement occurs in the discussion that follows:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

M: I mean, you can never always meet people's wants and


needs, so they 'ave to carefully think about what they put
on and when, I suppose.
N: Would you like to see more of your, say, like, own personal
favorite sports shown more on TV, or is it already shown
a lot?
S: It's already shown a lot--golf, uh, and football. I think
there's, uh, too much horse racing, though, during the day.
N: Yeah that's true.
S: Uh, but I suppose they gotta make their money somehow.
M: Yeah, but to me, I mean, 'ow are they gonna make money
out of just showing horse racing and all that?
S: Because the people that put money, uh, bet money on the
horses, you know, they like to watch the races too.
They're not always goin', like, to Ascot and those places.
M: Yeah, but I mean, if they want to do that, can't they just
go down to the betting shop and watch it there, 'cos I'm
sure they have coverage of the racing there, innit?
N: Personally I don't mind, uh, one sport being shown, but
when it comes to too much of one sport, it gets out of
hand, like eight hours of snooker a day plus the
highlights shown at the end of the day.
S: Yeah.
M: I wouldn't mind eight hours of football though.
S: Yeah. I wouldn't mind eight hours of football or golf-
sports I like.

The stilted formality of the "short-talk language sets an agenda of explicitness and reasoned argument, but a series of points to which all assent or contribute by providing illustrative examples is not how these boys understand their task (although we also have many examples of other groups where this is all that happens). In this case a process of utterance followed by ratification (a "ratification couplet") is initiated. N has assumed the role of chair and treats M's long turn, concluding with lines 1-3, as an answer to his request for views. Keeping the discussion going, therefore, he asks the question at lines 4-6, to which S t h s time responds with a complete answer (line 7) but expands the

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discussion by continuing with a new point not required by N's question: "I think there's too much horse racing through the day," which N is quick to ratify (line 9). He then adds the rider "but I suppose they gotta make their money somehow." Now there is a lack of logic to t h s remark; televising horse racing is not more lucrative than televising other sports events, and there is no connection between the betting companies and the TV channels. Thus the man-of-the-world street pragmatism of S's rider is essentially foolish and is challenged by M as such. This challenge is well hedged, however, with (1)the formal ratification and qualification marker "yeah but," (2) mitigating registration of the "only a personal view" disclaimer "to me," and (3) the mitigating "I mean." All these work to soften the attack on S's logic. S's answer, in effect that as most gamblers do not actually attend the races themselves they must therefore swell the TV audiences, does not answer theunderlying point. M comes backat himagain with the further point that, because betting offices have their own TV coverage of races, there is no need to cater to them on public channels. This further challenge is only slightly less mitigated than the first. This is as far as the disagreement is allowed to go, however. Rapidly, all concerned move to repair the conflict without ever sorting out either the basis of misunderstanding or the truth of the disagreement. At lines 19-22, N reassumes his role of theme manager to mediate the dispute with an indisputably "reasonable" point of view coupled with an equally bland qualification of it, and all safely under the aegis of the "personally" disclaimer. He brings together statement A (no particular sport should be excluded) with B (too much of one sport gets out of hand). Although his example ("eight hours of snooker plus the highlights") could be argued with on a number of counts, he knows that he is on safe ground with these particular interlocutors, especially given their shared concern with controlling the scope of disagreement. His intervention is quickly rewarded with a ratification from S (line 23), an ameliorative joke from M (line 24) which appealed to the "own preferences" that guaranteed the safety of N's reference to snooker, and finally the all-important ratification of M's joke by S. Within four turns (essentially two ratification couplets) the disagreement is fully repaired and the "cooperative" imperative asserted. Transactional reason, however, is lost. How one evaluates the educational value of this exercise is hard to tell given the confusion of oracy objectives. It could be argued that even the creation of a totally artificial arena of talk within which students must perform can be of value to the learning of language manipulation in structured face-to-face interaction. Nevertheless, the assessment of oral skills will clearly need to take into account the impact of contradictory educational objectives and ideologies on students' performances. The opinion that is often heard floating around in discussions involving critiques of oracy is "well, at least they're talking," and it does

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represent something of a victory for those progressive educators who worked hard to elevate "speaking and listening" in the classroom to the level at which it was considered a legitimate educational concern. Nevertheless, the effect of such legitimation has not been fully investigated, and it is as yet unknown whether or not the foregrounding of oral skills in themselves has a positive, negative, or neutral effect. The somewhatartificial oracy events we have observed may, in fact, rob the oral work of substantial intellectual benefits-or alternatively, more specific guidance and attention to speahng and listening skills may enhance collaboration and intellectual progress. The question that remains is whether a national oracy policy involving assessment will simply encourage oral work as a widespread practice whle neglecting the quality and aim of such practices in actual classrooms.

Roger Hewitt is senior research lecturer in the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London. Moira Inghilleri is visiting research fellow in the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London.

References Cited
Assessment of Performance Unit 1984 Language Performance in Schools: 1982 Primary Survey Report. London: Department of Education and Science. Barnes, Douglas, James Britton, and Harold Rosen 1969 Language, the Learner, and the School. London: Penguin. Barnes, Douglas 1976 From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1988 The Politics of Oracy. In Oracy Matters: The Development of Talking and Listening in Education. M. MacClure, T. Phillips, and A. Wilkinson, eds. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Barnes, Douglas, and Frank Todd 1977 Communication and Learning insmall Groups. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Britton, James 1970 Language and Learning. London: Penguin. Cazden, Courtney 1988 Classroom Discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5-16. London: Department of Education and Science. Dyson, Ann H. 1989 The Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write. New York: Teachers College. Hewitt, Roger 1989 The New Oracy: Another Critical Glance. Paper presented at British Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, University of Lancaster, England.

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Hynds, Susan, and Donald Rubin, eds. 1990 Perspectives on Talk and Learning. Urbana, IL: National Council on Teachers of English. Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Scollon 1981 Narrative, Literacy and Face in Inter-ethnic Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Street, Brian 1984 Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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