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5 STEPS TO FLUENCY 1 Try making your own vocab cards, and play the guessing game Taboo to help your pupils learn new vocabulary. You can find instructions at tinyurl.com/ tp-Taboo 2 Try echo reading ( tinyurl.com/ tp-echoreading ) to model fluency, expression and the impact of punctuation. 3 Create knowledge organisers, outlining the key vocabulary that pupils will learn for each of the topics you’re teaching. Provide concise definitions of key words, including Tier 2 and 3 words. 4 Use talk tasks: most schools in the UK use ‘talk partners’ to some extent, but now is the time to review and refine your approach to ensure that the tasks are well-suited, appropriately challenging, engaging and have clear outcomes. 5 Give your pupils the language to articulate their emotions. Many children will struggle to progress academically if their emotional needs are not met, so supporting them to identify and articulate their emotional state helps them to regulate their behaviour and leads to improved wellbeing. four pillars: cognitive, social and emotional, physical and linguistic – provides you with a shared language to use within your classroom and wider setting. It also helps you to identify gaps in your pupils’ knowledge of oracy skills and plan how to address them. We have used the tool as part of our approach to evaluating oracy across the Trust and sharing effective practice. Whether this is promoting cognitive oracy through the discussion of complex issues in PSHE, verbal reasoning in maths, or building the connection between the body and voice through reading aloud in English, encouraging our pupils to listen and express themselves is fundamental to their learning. Oracy in practice Giving children regular opportunities to speak in front of an audience, whether this is storytelling, poetry reading or presentations, can build their confidence and improve their tone, pace and fluency. As a teacher, you are an expert communicator and can also help improve your pupil’s oracy skills by modelling correct pronunciation and grammar during every conversation. As Dr Karen Treisman, clinical psychologist and author, says, “every interaction is an intervention”. If you’re talking to a pupil and they make an error, instead of directly correcting their mistakes, try repeating their sentences back to them correctly, which reinforces proper language use without discouraging them. For example, if they say, “I goed to the park,” you can respond by gently repeating, “Oh, you went to the park? That sounds fun!” This method helps them to hear the correct form without feeling like they have made a mistake. As pupils grow, it’s important to encourage them to voice their opinions and explain their reasoning within their dialogue. You can scaffold this learning by providing sentence starters that support pupils to build on and link to the ideas of others. For example: “My opinion is similar to Rose’s because…” or “Whilst I can see Tim’s point of view, I wonder if he’s considered….”. In science lessons, you could try making group predictions using prompts such as “To challenge you, I think the force of gravity might act differently depending on the object’s shape, not just its mass.” Using reasoning and problem solving to clarify understanding works well in mathematics lessons, too. For example, a good question could be “Are you saying that a square is also a rectangle because it has four sides and right angles?” Read the room As a Trust, we have an advantage in that we can draw on the variety of techniques and strategies from across our schools through knowledge-sharing during CPD sessions. However, while we are lucky to have so many different schools within our Trust, it is important to be mindful of their individual contexts – we firmly believe, as educationalist Dylan Williams states, that “everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere”. By taking your individual school context and pupils’ needs into consideration, you will be able to identify the approach that works best for your setting. This may be subscribing to a professional programme that provides training, support and resources, or simply applying some of the recommendations from the Oracy Commission and Oracy Cambridge, depending on the capabilities and knowledge that already exist in your school. Building your understanding of oracy, and drawing on the tools and resources available to support your pupils’ development, means that you will help to equip them with the critical thinking, clear communication, and confident self-expression skills needed to strengthen their oracy alongside their reading, writing, and arithmetic. TP TamsinDuckett is deputy director of standards and school improvement at Chelmsford Learning Partnership. clptrust.com www.teachwire.net | 29 F EATURE S ORAC Y