What is good oracy?

And how can we find out?

What is oracy?

The word ‘oracy’ was coined in the 1960s by Andrew Wilson. He defined oracy as the capacity to use and understand speech and express thoughts, a competency fundamental to learning.

What is good oracy?

Defining good oracy is harder, because oracy assessment has many practical and philosophical challenges. It’s harder to capture the speech of students than it is to capture their writing and it’s time-consuming to administer assessments. If we want to assess oracy using authentic tasks that are assessed holistically, we face the typical problems of such assessments: marker unreliability, vague assessment criteria, and rubrics which stereotype responses. Some of these issues contributed to the 2013 decision by Ofqual, the exam regulator in England, to remove the speaking and listening element from the final English GCSE grade.¹ Since then, there has been renewed interest in finding a more robust way of assessing oracy.²

Oracy, an unspoken construct

In England we like to define constructs and create external assessments from those constructs. However, that’s not the only possible approach. In Norway, schools have been teaching and assessing oracy since 1883 and this is achieved without either statements of standards or external assessments. Rather, oracy is seen to exist as an unspoken construct in the teachers’ knowledge base. While there are some doubts as to the precise definition of oracy, teachers are able to offer working definitions of what they are teaching. For example:

“Oracy is to be able to express yourself, present something orally, be able to reason orally, be able to argue, and participate in discussions.”³

Regarding quality of progression, some teachers are clear that this can be assessed, and suggest that it can come from the discussion of more complex ideas. This is something that can often be missed when working with generic statements of attainment.

“The first Norwegian (L1) oral assignment at the lower secondary level in the eighth grade could be to talk about, for example, their teddy bear. However, in the tenth grade, an oral presentation could speak about Knut Hamsun and the Neo-romanticism movements or talk about Knut Hamsun’s prosaic lyrical writing style. I would say that this is a good progression.”⁴

Could we do something similar in England, and tease out the unspoken construct of oracy from teachers?

Building a community view on oracy

In order to help us understand, we are running a research project with schools to gather oracy samples that we will then share amongst the teachers to be assessed in a Comparative Judgement framework. Comparative Judgement will allow us to start building a scale of oracy which we can then examine qualitatively in conjunction with the teachers, so we can develop a community view of what good oracy is.

In running this trial we are following the same approach as we have used for writing. We didn’t set out any guidelines for teachers on what good writing should look like; instead, we allowed the teachers to build the construct of good writing through their professional judgements.

If you are interested in being involved in our project, you can read more here.

With thanks to Dr Michelle Meadows, Associate Professor in Educational Assessment, for providing direction to our thoughts.

1. https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2013/09/04/our-announcement-on-speaking-and-listening-assessments/

2. Mercer, N., Warwick, P., & Ahmed, A. (2017). An oracy assessment toolkit: Linking research and development in the assessment of students’ spoken language skills at age 11–12. Learning and Instruction, 48, 51–60; https://compare.rm.com/blog/2022/04/a-new-approach-to-oracy-assessment/

3. https://journals.uio.no/adnorden/article/view/8143 page 9

4. https://journals.uio.no/adnorden/article/view/8143 page 13