roger hewitt, oracy in the classroom

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Oracy in the Classroom: Policy, Pedagogy, andGroup Oral WorkROGERHEWITT N D M O IRA NG H ~ L L E RISocial Science Research Unit,lnstitute of Education,Un iversity of LondonCurrently in the United States, researchers and educators are emphasizing theimportance of classroom talkas a means to a particular instructional goal, whilein the United Kingdom, speaking and listening skills in themselves are beingforegrounded as a site of pedagogic activity. The effect of such legitimation hasnot been fully investigated however, and in the U.K. sett ing, it is not alwaysclear what the aims and purposes of a particular oral activity are. Based onobservations in six inner-london schools, we consider how such ambiguities ofpurpose 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 importanceof talk and its relationship to thinking and learning in the classroom(Cazden 1988; Dyson 1989; Hynds and Rubin 1990).Of special concernis enculturating students from diverse cultural backgrounds into school-based discourse norms in particular content areas such as mathematicsand science. Teachers here are being encouraged to include oral groupwork, discussion, and other forms of classroom talk which supporthigher-order thinking and collaborative learning. By and large, how-ever, oral work activities in U.S. classrooms take place on an ad hoc basisand primarily in schools concerned with innovating within the curricu-lum. And it is primarily the instrumental role of talk that has been treatedas important while little emphasis has been placed on talking skills as inthemselves deserving attention.In theU.K.,ducational concerns for the development of communica-tive, expressive, and intellectual abilities have led to the conducting andassessment of oral work in English classrooms. There it has been deter-mined that the communicative skills demanded by these activitiesshould be specifically taught to students, and thus oral language itself isforegrounded as a site of pedagogic activity. And this interest in talk hasspread beyond English to other core subjects in the national curriculumsuch as mathematics and science.This article concerns developments in the United l n g d o m withregard to the recent endorsement in their national curriculum of the

Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24(4):308-317. Copyright O 1993, AmericanAnthropological Association.

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309ewitt, Inghilleri Group Oral Work in the Classroomimportance of "speaking and listening skills" referred to in the U.K. asoracy. While there is no comparable curriculum policy here in the U.S.,many of the issues and concerns that have been raised by researchersand educators there concerning official oracy policy and practices echosome of our own concerns with respect to the organization and assess-ment of collaborative activities involving talk in socioculturally diverseclassrooms.The development of a national policy-related interest in oracy inBritain has been supported by a convergence of different constituenciesof academic interest. These include approaches to oracy as important toindividual learning and intellectual development, oral group work asan important aid to group learning, the importance of talk and narrativein children's self-expression, and oracy as a valuable civic attributerelated both to the democratic process and to talk in the workplace.From such a variety of interests, the space provided by the concept oforacy may become occupied in a number of ways in terms both of theactivities engaged in and of the range of values attached to differentspeech events. Thus, the kinds of oral language activities which will bedeveloped and monitored by teachers over the next few years will bethe product of a confluence of different kinds of input. It still remains tobe seen how oral work will be constructed and how what is constructedwill relate to the objectives of official policy. This will no doubt beinfluenced by such things as assessment needs, teaching resources,educational ideologies, local student populations, and teacher-trainingexperience and adaptability. In our own work in six inner-londonschools serving communities of different class and ethnic backgrounds,we observed many different practices depending on, among otherthngs, teachers' familiarity with and interpretation of the function oforal work in their classrooms.Moreover, much of the oral work we witnessed seemed to representa convergence of several traditions informed by very different intellec-tual and ideological approaches to oral language in the classroom. Thisseems to have created an element of confusion concerning the aims andpurposes of talk in schools and, it would appear, may be leading someteachers to set contradictory or unrealizable objectives in at least someaspects of oral work in their classrooms. We would like to expand a littleon the traditions that have been evident in oral work in English class-rooms in Britain over the years.One of the earliest traditions of oral work, whch we will refer to asthe Augustan tradition, has its roots in 19th- and early-20th-centuryclassroom activities. Here emphasis was both on the aesthetics of oralperformance, that is, the tradition of the recitation and the performanceof dramatic or poetic texts from the canons of English literature (and itsoffshoot, the elocution class), and on the discursive tradition that in-volved the class debate or individual talk on a chosen topic, emphasizinglogic of argument and clarity of expression. The student of this tradition


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310 Anthropology 6 Education Quarterly Volume 24,1993was expected to "echo the voice of high culture" with clear, unambigu-ous, 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 wasless on the high culture existing outside of the individual student andfar more on the "voice of the child" in a social context. This very differentapproach to the oral performance was a product of several develop-ments, not the least of which was the dramatic restructuring of Britisheducation following World War 11, when the education of the workingclass received national attention.By the 1960s more and more attentionwas being paid to the lives and cultures of working-class students. Anew concept of oral work emerged in schools, a concept behind whichlay the recognition of what children brought with them into the class-room both in the oral forms of their communities and in their languages,dialects, and idioms. It was during t h s period that linguistics andsociolinguistics (in particular, the work of Labov, Hymes, and Halliday)made an enormous impact on English teaching in Britain. The emphasisturned to expressive forms like popular narrative and oral cornrnunica-tion as an activity taking place within face-to-face situations whereindividuals could draw on a shared community culture.At the same time and within this romantic tradition, there emerged aninterest in the role of language and cognitive development as well. JamesBritton, drawing on the work of Bruner and Vygotsky, stressed theimportance of language to learning (Britton 1970). He, together withDouglas Barnes and Harold Rosen, introduced the idea to teachers ofthe importance of talkand small-group work in their classrooms (Barneset al. 1969; Barnes 1976; Barnes and Todd 1977). Here, talk and collabo-rative learning activities were also linked to social slulls and the coopera-tive dimension of talk was foregrounded as fundamental. This was anextension of the collectivist interests and concerns that predominatedwithn this tradition.Recently, Barnes and others have expressed concern that the kinds ofgroup-dynamic and interpersonal skills valued as important aspects ofcommunity have been taken over by a conservative voice and the rise inthe U.K. of a "new vocationalism" where emphasis on oral skills servesto socialize young people in the values and current needs of the work-place (Barnes 1988).But this is not the only area in whch such "reconstituting" can be saidto have occurred. In looking at the rise in interest in oracy through the1980s, what is most strilung is how very different intellectual traditionsand the ideologies that inform them have been borrowed fromand mostapparently smoothed out in official policy documents; how vestiges ofthe Augustan tradition have reappeared; how the voice of sociolinguis-tics has been incorporated; how expressive "orality" has been given aback seat; and how the intellectual, cognitive benefits of oral work havebeen foregrounded


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National-curriculum-policydocuments together with official assess-ment criteria and testing procedures constitute what must be viewed asa new orthodoxy, what Hewitt has elsewhere termed the new oracy, withrespect to how oral communication within English as a school subject isconstructed (Hewitt 1989). This new orthodoxy includes an interest in anotion of "transactional talk," which is, according to one official docu-ment, "spoken language where it is predominantly the content thatmatters; it is information-related or transactional in its functions andcharacteristically has a definable purpose" (Department of Educationand Science 1989). This interest in transactional talk can be viewed as aproduct of the more conservative, pragmatic approach to education inBritain which has emerged since the late 1970s. But it has also beenmadepossible by the political pliability of the language of sociolinguisticswhich informs it.If we trace just how transactional talk has managed to dominate thelanguage of official government working reports and documents devel-oping oral work in schools, we find that it relies on terms introducedthrough sociolinguistics like communicative competence and appropriate-ness to purpose and audience. But though the intention behind theseterms in Hymes's notion of communicative competence implied genu-ine purposes arising out of everyday social interaction, in the new oracythese terms are also available as support for the concern that studentslearn to convey information clearly, concisely, and unambiguously. Asone government report states, for example, "communication will havefailed if the listener does not discover which platform the train leavesfrom or how to load the program into the computer" (Department ofEducation and Science 1989).Hence, the voice of sociolinguistics, whichin the sixties and seventies accompanied "expressive orality" and con-cerns for "hearing the voice of the child," is found in the 1980s harmo-nizing with the "skills-centered concerns" of those with very differentpolitical interests.The actual practices of individual teachers or schools with respect tooral work are, of course, not strictly determined by official policy. Andas we suggested earlier, there is a lot of room for interpretation in thenew and broadly defined concept of oracy. In our own research, weobserved a wide variety of practices depending on the interests, ideolo-gies of language, training, etc. of teachers and subject advisors. What isa concern, however, when several different traditions converge, iswhether or not teachers and students are clear on what the aims andpurposes of a particular oracy "event" are. In our research, a fairlytypical oracy activity combined elements of several traditions. Thefollowing examples provide some illustration of this type of conver-gence.In one small-group activity we observed, four Afro-Caribbean boysdiscussed the topic of smoking. The context wasag roupor al test in whichone 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 wasexpected to respond. In this example, prior to the start of the "test"performance there was a lot of joking about the topic, including com-ments like "smokin' what." When the test began however, the boydelivered a talk, straight out of an antismoking campaign, on the hazardsof smoking. The rest of the boys cooperated (for they too were beingtested) by posing relatively unchallenging questions like "Do you ap-prove of smoking in public places?" to which he obligngly responded.In another very different type of group oral activity, we observed twogroups of students (one all white and the other all Afro-Caribbean)worlung on a task related to the topic of apartheid in South Africa. Thesestudents had been instructed to match different segments of written texttaken from a larger story to a photograph and then work out the orderof the segments in order to reproduce the whole story. The groups spentthe class period reading the segments aloud, following which minimaltalking and collaboration took place, just enough to accomplish the taskof correctly ordering the story.Such performances raise questions as to what kind of communicativeslulls or practices students are expected to acquire through group oralactivities, and what exactly teachers can or do assess. For instance, doesa grou p oral test like the one described in our first example allow a teacherto assess a student's ability to research and present information, theability to present this information clearly and fluently, or the ability to"think on your feet" when asked a question? Or was it merely an exercisein delivering (or listening to) a short speech with little personal invest-ment in the topic-an activity that appears to encourage rather bland,consensual opinions?Likewise, in our example of the groups worlung with the topic ofapartheid, the purpose of the task and its relation to the acquisition oforal skills was not immediately clear. For example, did the teacher intendto assess the individual student's reading comprehension or ability toread aloud fluently? Or was the students' ability to work collaborativelyin matching pictures to a written text considered of primary concern?Furthermore, this type of activity, which deals with a controversial socialissue or current event, raises thequestion of what results when students'engagement with "relevant material" (in the romantic tradition) takesplace withn a rather undefined artificial event. In t h s case, a well-inten-tioned teacher chose the topic of apartheid assuming it to be a meaning-ful and important issue for the groups to discuss. Instead, what occurred(and we observed this on several occasions) was that a topic like racismbecame a lund of educational commodity, transformed into a merevehicle for the assessment of decontextualized oral language practices.The students' reaction was to respond to it as such, and therefore a topicthat was supposed to connect for them in some real way became discon-nected and regarded as existing outside of themselves.


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Such ambiguities of purpose are clearly reflected at the level of dis-course organization. One prevailing ambiguity, as we see it, arises fromthe pressures to encourage both cooperative group work and "clear"transactional language. In a sense it is a bundle of objectives in whichthe former is fundamentally derived from actual oral practice while thelatter is underpinned by a specific set of literacy notions-"ideologicalliteracy" perhaps (Street 1984) or "essayist literacy" (Scollon and Scollon1981). These contradictions seem to produce clashes with which thestudents are forced to deal. We found some indications, for example,that verbal explicitness is often symbolically linked to social distance. Itcertainly seemed that explicitness was sometimes avoided, even at theexpense of mutual understanding, because to be seen not to use sparse,implicit language grounded on the expectation of mutual under-standing was to imply a lack of social closeness. The conveying ofmeaning was thus jeopardized in the interests of not rocking the inter-actional boat. It is also interesting to note how many of the tests designedby the Assessment of Performance Unit (1984) to measure transactionaloral skills involved students sitting on either side of a screen andexplaining things to each other, imagining they were only in telephonecontact, or otherwise being socially disconnected from each other.There does seem to be an implicit social model that lies behind someof the tangled ideologies of oral work assessment to which both studentsand oral assessors orient themselves. It may be expressed simply asfollows:

f00perahve TransactionalLanguage: implicit/vague explicit/preciseSocial Relationships: close distantIn the setting up of some oral tasks, the contradictory injunction tocombine the uncombinable produces considerable tension evident in thediscourse produced.We found that commonly the tension was resolved by the studentsdeveloping their own specialized modality of the "interpersonal" inwhich the talk was bracketed off from normal intercourse and treated aswholly artificial, with the clear corollary that the identities of the stu-dents in interaction and any closeness was not at stake in these perform-ances. This simple solution (obviously the one adopted by the boys inthe "smoking" talk alluded to above) does, however, throw up its ownproblems. In particular the problem of disagreement looms especiallylarge. Under the definition of cooperation, students are encouraged tobalance the direct expression of their individual points of view with"tolerance and respect" for the points of view of others. Interactivelystraightforward disagreement is disprefemed, but students also realizethe value of disagreement as a demonstration of the "play of intellect"


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314 Anthropology G. Education Quarterly Volume 24,1993which provides the evidence of "lively" talk. For this reason, disagree-ment may be both done and not done at the same time-especially wherethe pedagogc objectives are emphatically present. The following is anexample of discursive ambiguity in practice.In the text below,N has just delivered a five-minute talk on "Sport onTV," which he concluded with: ". . . so if there was an individual sportschannel, there could be minority sports showing female sports, showing,and uh, mixed sports, showing, uh. I would like to know your views onthese points." A second speaker (M )makes a short contribution of whichthe final sentence is reproduced below. The disagreement occurs in thediscussion that follows:

1 M: I mean, you can never always meet people's wants and 2 needs, so they 'ave to carefully think about what they put 3 on and when, I suppose. 4 N: Would you like to see more of your, say, like, own personal 5 favorite sports shown more on TV, or is it already shown 6 a lot? 7 S: It's already shown a lot--golf, uh, and football. I think 8 there's, uh, too much horse racing, though, during the day. 9 N: Yeah that's true. 10 S: Uh, but I suppose they gotta make their money somehow. 11 M: Yeah, but to me, I mean, 'ow are they gonna make money 12 out of just showing horse racing and all that? 13 S: Because the people that put money, uh, bet money on the 14 horses, you know, they like to watch the races too. 15 They're not always goin', like, to Ascot and those places. 16 M: Yeah, but I mean, if they want to do that, can't they just 17 go down to the betting shop and watch it there, 'cos I'm 18 sure they have coverage of the racing there, innit? 19 N: Personally I don't mind, uh, one sport being shown, but 20 when it comes to too much of one sport, it gets out of 21 hand, like eight hours of snooker a day plus the 22 highlights shown at the end of the day. 23 S: Yeah. 24 M: I wouldn't mind eight hours of football though. 25 S: Yeah. I wouldn't mind eight hours of football or golf- 26 sports I like. The stilted formality of the "short-talk language sets an agenda ofexplicitness and reasoned argument, but a series of points to which allassent or contribute by providing illustrative examples is not how theseboys understand their task (although we also have many examples of

other groups where this is all that happens). In this case a process ofutterance followed by ratification (a "ratification couplet") is initiated.N has assumed the role of chair and treats M's long turn, concludingwith lines 1-3, as an answer to his request for views. Keeping thediscussion going, therefore, he asks the question at lines 4-6, to which Sth 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 isquick to ratify (line 9). He then adds the rider "but I suppose they gottamake their money somehow." Now there is a lack of logic to th s remark;televising horse racing is not more lucrative than televising other sportsevents, and there is no connection between the betting companies andthe TV channels. Thus the man-of-the-world street pragmatism of S'srider is essentially foolish and is challenged byM as such. This challengeis well hedged, however, with (1)the formal ratification and qualifica-tion marker "yeah but," (2) mitigating registration of the "only a per-sonal view" disclaimer "to me," and (3) the mitigating "I mean." Allthese work to soften the attack on S's logic.S's answer, in effect that as most gamblers do not actually attend theraces themselves they must therefore swell the TV audiences, does notanswer theunderlying point.M comes backat himagain with the furtherpoint that, because betting offices have their ownTV coverage of races,there is no need to cater to them on public channels. This furtherchallenge 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 eitherthe basis of misunderstanding or the truth of the disagreement. At lines19-22, N reassumes his role of theme manager to mediate the disputewith an indisputably "reasonable" point of view coupled with anequally bland qualification of it, and all safely under the aegis of the"personally" disclaimer. He brings together statement A (no particularsport should be excluded) with B (too much of one sport gets out ofhand). Although his example ("eight hours of snooker plus the high-lights") could be argued with on a number of counts, he knows that heis on safe ground with these particular interlocutors, especially giventheir shared concern with controlling the scope of disagreement.His intervention is quickly rewarded with a ratification from S (line23), an ameliorative joke from M (line 24) which appealed to the "ownpreferences" that guaranteed the safety of N's reference to snooker, andfinally the all-important ratification of M's joke by S. Within four turns(essentially two ratification couplets) the disagreement is fully repairedand the "cooperative" imperative asserted. Transactional reason, how-ever, is lost.How one evaluates the educational value of this exercise is hard to tellgiven the confusion of oracy objectives. It could be argued that even thecreation of a totally artificial arena of talk within which students mustperform can be of value to the learning of language manipulation instructured face-to-face interaction. Nevertheless, the assessment of oralskills will clearly need to take into account the impact of contradictoryeducational objectives and ideologies on students' performances.The opinion that is often heard floating around in discussions involv-ing 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 whoworked hard to elevate "speaking and listening" in the classroom to thelevel at which it was considered a legitimate educational concern. Nev-ertheless, the effect of such legitimation has not been fully investigated,and it is as yet unknown whether or not the foregrounding of oral skillsin themselves has a positive, negative, or neutral effect. The somewhat-artificial oracy events we have observed may, in fact, rob the oral workof substantial intellectual benefits-or alternatively, more specific guid-ance and attention to speahng and listening skills may enhance collabo-ration and intellectual progress. The question that remains is whether anational oracy policy involving assessment will simply encourage oralwork as a widespread practice wh le neglecting the quality and aim ofsuch practices in actual classrooms.

RogerHewitt is senior research lecturer in the Social Science Research Unit atthe Institute of Education, University of London. Moira Inghilleri is visitingresearch fellow in the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education,University of London.

ReferencesCitedAssessment of Performance Unit1984 Language Performance in Schools: 1982 Primary Survey Report. Lon-don: Department of Education and Science.Barnes, Douglas, James Britton, and Harold Rosen1969 Language, the Learner, and the School. London: Penguin.Barnes, Douglas1976 From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin.1988 The Politics of Oracy. In Oracy Matters: The Development of Talkingand Listening in Education. M. MacClure, T. Phillips, and A. Wilkinson, eds.

Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Barnes, Douglas, and Frank Todd1977 Communication and Learning insmall Groups. London: Routledge andKegan Paul.Britton, James1970 Language and Learning. London: Penguin.Cazden, Courtney1988 Classroom Discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.Department of Education and Science1989 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. NewYork: Teachers College.Hewitt, Roger1989 The New Oracy: Another Critical Glance. Paper presented at BritishAssociation of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, University of Lan-caster, England.


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317ewitt, Inghilleri Group Oral Work in the ChssroomHynds, Susan, and Donald Rubin, eds.

1990 Perspectives on Talk and Learning. Urbana, IL: National Council onTeachers of English.Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Scollon1981 Narrative, Literacy and Face in Inter-ethnic Communication. Norwood,NJ: Ablex.

Street, Brian1984 Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

roger hewitt, oracy in the classroom

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