There are few skills that we depend upon throughout our lives as much as spoken language. Whether it’s selling ourselves in an interview, explaining a problem to a friend or simply making a doctor’s appointment over the phone, most of us are using oral language on a daily basis to help us succeed in life.

Yet, the importance of spoken language has largely gone unrecognised by the national curriculum since the National Oracy Project ended in 1993. Spoken language has repeatedly been sidelined in favour of numeracy and literacy, with the decision to drop the speaking and listening components of GCSE English in 2013 seen by some as a final nail in the coffin for the teaching of oracy.

But not everyone has given up on the spoken word. In recent years, interest has increased in research on the value of teaching oral language - and calls for schools to pay more attention to this crucial set of skills are slowly getting louder.

One of the researchers raising her voice in favour of oracy learning is University of Bristol educational psychologist Ioanna Bakopoulou, who researches oral language. She specialises in what teachers could do to elevate the spoken word to help all children to succeed.

“Oral language skills are fundamental for children in accessing the curriculum,” explains Bakopoulou. “They are the cornerstone of literacy skills, both reading and writing. But they go beyond school readiness because they are also linked to social and emotional wellbeing. Oral language affects a child’s experience at home and at school; it introduces them to the social world, helping them to form relationships.

“Our ability to interact effectively influences our wellbeing and there’s a huge amount of research, including my own, which suggests that difficulty with interacting with others and accessing the curriculum leads to behavioural problems. This increases the risk of exclusion from school and, in the most extreme cases, can lead to young people entering the criminal justice system.”

Through her research, Bakopoulou is hoping to address some of these problems by providing teachers with resources to incorporate oracy learning into their lessons.

In a 2015 paper, along with colleagues from the UCL Institute of Education and the universities of Warwick, Sheffield and Newcastle, Bakopoulou developed the Communication Supporting Classrooms Observation Tool, which helps teachers to assess how the oracy of their pupils is being nurtured (available to download at thecommunicationtrust.org.uk). The team developed the tool based on an evidence review of 62 research papers, and identified three main areas, or “dimensions”, for teachers to focus on.

The first dimension is the language-learning environment. “This includes features of the classroom environment to which children are exposed and the organisation of the classroom space,” says Bakopoulou. “It provides an infrastructure to promote the quality and quantity of children’s oral language experiences.”

The tool gives examples of what teachers should look for here, including well-lit classrooms, plenty of open space and learning areas that are clearly labelled with words or pictures, or both.

The second dimension focuses on structured opportunities for language learning, such as small-group work, interactive book reading and structured opportunities for high-quality verbal input among peers and adults.

Meanwhile, the third deals with what Bakopoulou refers to as the “very important language-learning interactions” that occur between teachers and pupils. Teachers can use a range of techniques to improve these interactions, she says, “from simple things like getting down to a child’s level when speaking, using their name and using visual support, to more advanced techniques, such as using open-ended questions, expanding and recasting [or] giving them a script that they can repeat and use themselves”.

The idea of the tool is to give teachers a framework against which to assess their current practice. But is such a tool really needed? Surely teachers are already providing pupils with opportunities to practise their spoken language through lessons as a matter of course?

As part of their research, Bakopoulou and her colleagues carried out a feasibility study, testing the tool in 101 classrooms in 39 schools across England. Overall, they found that a large number of classrooms achieved high scores on the language-learning environment dimension, but that scores were lower for language-learning opportunities and language-learning interactions. So, in those two areas in particular, the tool has the potential to help improve outcomes by drawing attention to the gaps in provision and then supplying the scaffolding to help fill them.

“[The tool] can support teachers to profile their language-learning environment, but can also be used as part of school staff’s continuous professional development,” says Bakopoulou. “It’s designed to be used by anyone in the classroom, it’s freely available and can be used flexibly. For instance, the Sendco [special educational needs and disabilities coordinator] can use it and feed back to the class teacher, or teachers might record their sessions to look back on and review their practice. It could be used as a whole-school resource by school senior management to evaluate and support effective teaching practice for all children, or it could contribute to intervention evaluations, comparing differences across time, and looking at changes in the ways in which communication is supported before and after implementing the intervention.”

Strategies in practice

The potential for the tool to be used as a whole-school resource is key, stresses Bakopoulou, because if schools want to get better at how they provide for spoken language learning, then a whole-school approach is needed.

But she also points out that there are some stages at which interventions will be more effective than others. Across her body of research, Bakopoulou focuses on Reception and key stage 1 because these years are particularly crucial for oral language learning.

“The sensitive window in child development is up until the age of 5,” she says. “If it doesn’t happen then, those skills may never fully develop, so the earlier the intervention, the better.”

That explains when interventions should be deployed, but does the research tell us anything about the types of intervention that are most effective?

In another project, Supporting Spoken Language in the Classroom (SSLiC), Bakopoulou and her team worked with schools to investigate whole-school approaches, considering how research on oral language might be applied to particular settings - and how this collective knowledge could inform the wider community of what works for children in schools.

Similar in structure to the Communication Supporting Classrooms Observation Tool, the SSLiC programme identified five evidence-informed domains around which schools can focus professional development and learning. These domains are: language leadership; staff professional development and learning; communication-supporting classrooms; identifying and supporting speech, language and communication needs; and working with others.

Bakopoulou and her team have recently finished the SSLiC pilot study in 10 schools in areas of high deprivation across London and South West England. Full results have yet to be published, but Bakopoulou has written impact case studies for all 10 schools and put them together in a report that has recently been published by the UCL Institute of Education.

The case studies provide examples of the types of intervention that can work effectively. For instance, one school chose to work collaboratively with parents on spoken language. “They did that by exploring parental views on how children’s language can be supported both at home and at school through a questionnaire, which was completed by 60 parents in the early years and KS1,” says Bakopoulou. “They offered an ‘open classroom’ event where parents could attend lessons during the school day and watch teachers model language-learning interaction techniques, and they also invited parents to a presentation that explored typical language development and approaches to support language at home.”

The culmination of these strategies, she continues, is that the school now has an additional section of its website focused on oral language.

Meanwhile, another school opted to support professional development by pairing up teachers as “communication buddies”. The school started by carrying out observations using the Communication Supporting Classrooms Observation Tool in all early years and KS1 classrooms.

“Each teacher was allocated a communication buddy and, based on the results of the observations, each pair set areas for development that were reviewed every two weeks,” says Bakopoulou. “The areas for development spanned the three dimensions of the tool, so they worked on making changes and improving those dimensions.”

These are just two examples of the kinds of strategies that can work well. Once the full results of the pilot study are released, she hopes that we will be able to understand even more about what works and what doesn’t in spoken-language teaching. But she is certain that knowledge sharing and closer working relationships between teachers and researchers is the key to supporting further developments in this area.

“What distinguishes the SSLiC programme is that it’s a knowledge exchange programme,” says Bakopoulou. “There is bi-directional collaboration between researchers and practitioners throughout the programme. The evidence base that we provide to schools is enriched and informed by practitioners themselves through the work they do as part of the SSLiC, so there is an emphasis on the importance of longevity of our working relationship.”

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 1 March 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Spoken language”