We encourage students to develop their active listening skills and respond appropriately to others’ viewpoints. Students recognise that communication isn’t just verbal but physical aspects and non-verbal elements are important. We encourage students to reflect upon how they communicate with others not only through their vocabulary choice and content of their speech but their voice and body language.
We explicitly teach students how to present, how to debate, how to challenge and how to extend others’ opinions. We encourage students to use sentence stems to help them to organise their speech and to frame their talk appropriately. We give students opportunities to speak in lessons as well as AoWs, debates and other more formal environments.
We teach students how to connect their writing to their speaking, giving them models to support them as they write. By using real world podcasts and experts’ recordings, we encourage students to speak as a subject expert. We want students to be aware of how they should construct their speech for a specific audience and purpose – thinking about vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and tone.
We help students to make connections between speaking and writing and encourage them to talk and discuss ideas before they plan a response.
Supporting Oracy at home:
Encourage your child to show that they are listening to a speaker through their body language and gestures.
Encourage your child to talk in full sentences and play games like talking for a minute on a particular topic or trying to persuade you that their viewpoint is correct.
Prompt your child to ask others questions and to summarise their answer.
As well as wider reading, you could encourage your child to engage in wider listening to develop their subject knowledge and their expert voice. Listen to some of our recommended podcasts together and discuss what you have heard.
