#presentational talk

According to Phil Beadle, oracy is the most fundamental and most important skill (empathy aside) humans have to acquire. Being able to organise and articulate your thoughts orally is pivotal to success in life. Ros Wilson, the originator of Big Writing (popular in many primary schools) tells us, “If you can’t speak it, you can’t write it.” Her logic is worth repeating:

1. We can only say what we can think.

2. We can only write what we can say.

3. But if we can say it, we can write it.

The more able we are to articulate thought in speech, the more able we will be with the written word. Therefore, if we want to improve students’ ability to write, we need to first of all improve their ability to express themselves in the spoken word. If they can say it, they can write it.

Up-skilling talk: how to ‘speak like an essay’

One of the means Ros Wilson uses to get better quality work from her students is through the concept of ‘up-skilling talk’. What this means is that when a student makes a statement or answers a question, we need to prompt them to “talk it in posh”: to speak in the academic language of our subject, like an essay, a historian or a designer. If we want pupils to ‘speak like a scientist’ then we need them not only to use subject-specific keywords, but we also need them to use language in a way that a scientist would. We need to model this through our own language, but also more importantly to scaffold our students’ ability to use academic language. If we do this, their ability to speak will shift, and so will their ability to think. Compare: “When they are cold the particles are close together, and when they are hot they move further apart” with “The expansion of particles causes matter to change state from solid to gas whereas the contraction of particles causes matter to change state from gas to solid.” Or, “Particles in a gas are far apart” with, “The particles in a gas are more diffuse.” If students can talk about science using the language of science then they will have started to think like a scientist. And if we change students’ way of thinking, we change their ability to write. A simple request for students to re-phrase their responses can be very effective – and much better than accepting and praising the more basic responses and moving on.

How to do this using ‘Thought Stems’

David Didau’s idea is to use Thought Stems, like the one above, to prompt students to reword their thoughts in the kind of language they need to use in writing. This helps them to ‘speak like an essay.’ We do this by turning the kind of scaffolding we usually use for essays into prompts for expressing ideas verbally in the classroom. Display the prompts around the room and then direct pupils to express their ideas using the Thought Stems.

Using thought stems means that students are required to think using the academic language of your subject. This increases the likelihood that they will learn to ‘think like an essay’, not only articulating their meaning more clearly, but also to structure their ideas and therefore to be able to write them down.

In teaching our subjects, we need to identify areas where teaching students the most appropriate language to use needs to take centre stage; we need to ‘make the implicit explicit’. Subject specific literacy is something we’re all responsible for and it’s very often the key to learning the subjects themselves. So, if we want our students to write like experts, we would do well to first help them to speak like an essay. As Phil Beadle suggests, we might also want to do this because:

“Being able to speak well and being able to articulate their internal world is of immense value in itself: it will make our students more successful; it will make them better friends; it will make them more interesting, more attractive, more charming; it will make them more able to understand the world, more able to articulate nuance, and less likely to hit things.”

And who can argue with that?

References and further reading

Phil Beadle, Literacy (Independent Thinking Press)

David Didau, The Secret of Literacy (Independent Thinking Press)

See also: http://www.learningspy.co.uk/english-gcse/teacher-talk-the-missing-link/