Oracy
Oracy is the ability to speak and listen well. It covers vocabulary, structure, and the social skills of dialogue, and it is increasingly recognised as a foundational outcome of schooling.
- Subject
- Cross-curricular
- Key stage
- All
Oracy is the term Andrew Wilkinson coined in 1965 to name the spoken counterpart of literacy and numeracy. The UK has spent the sixty years since then mostly ignoring it. The Voice 21 charity and the 2024 Oracy Education Commission have started to turn that around.
What it is
The ability to speak and listen effectively. Voice 21’s framework breaks it into four strands: physical (clarity, pace, projection), linguistic (vocabulary and grammar of spoken language), cognitive (reasoning, sequencing, choosing relevant content), and social and emotional (turn-taking, listening, responding).
Oracy is not just about confidence. Confident pupils with weak structure are easy to spot. Diffident pupils with strong structure are the harder thing to develop.
Why it matters
Spoken language is the medium through which most learning happens. Pupils who cannot articulate an idea cannot easily test it. The Mercer trial found that structured oracy improved attainment in maths and science, not just English.
There is also an equity case. Vocabulary gaps in early speech predict reading comprehension gaps later. Explicit oracy teaching narrows the gap.
How to use it
Build talk routines into existing lessons. Sentence stems for reasoning (“I agree because”, “I would build on that by”), talk roles in group work, structured debate formats. Use the Chalk Oracy Stems tool to generate stems for specific tasks.
Routines like hexagon concept maps and Diamond 9 ranking are oracy activities by design; they only work if pupils have to defend a decision out loud.
When not to use it
Oracy is poorly served by a single show-and-tell session per term. The work is in regular, low-stakes practice across subjects, not in occasional set-piece events.
Related Chalk tools
Oracy Stems, Three Heads, Diamond 9, and Hexagons all build structured talk into the activity.
Evidence
Neil Mercer's classroom RCTs found that structured oracy lifted attainment in maths and science as well as in English. Voice 21's framework operationalises the practice; the EEF literacy guidance recommends explicit oracy routines. The evidence is stronger for structured talk routines than for "discussion" generically.
Try this in Chalk
Related concepts
Questions teachers ask
Is oracy a subject or a strand?
How do I teach oracy without it becoming chaos?
Is oracy the same as discussion?
Oracy Stems
Sentence stems and discussion scaffolds for structured classroom talk.
Open Oracy Stems