Ruth Loxley | Hastings High School
Project rationale
My original exploratory research question actually focused on the oracy to writing process and was: ‘to what extent do oracy strategies improve the writing skills of low ability Year 10 boys?’ However, when I started this project, I quickly found that there were a number of barriers to talk in my classroom, and so using oracy as a vehicle to writing actually slowed down the journey rather than accelerating it. After a few lessons trying to focus on talk as a scaffold to writing, I found that students were extremely reticent and most did not want to talk to one another in pairs, talk out loud to the class or in groups. Consequently, I decided to do a bit of research on what these barriers to talk were, and, based on the findings, I shifted my focus to the writing to oracy process.
Therefore, my evaluative research question was changed to: ‘to what extent do writing to oracy strategies improve the confidence in presentational talk of a low ability Year 10 class?’ My focus was on presentational talk as we were coming up to the preparation phase of the GCSE English Spoken Language, in which students had to speak in front of the class on a chosen topic for 3 minutes and then answer some questions on their topic. These presentations were to be graded by me but also recorded for standardisation purposes by AQA in the future.
I expanded my focus to the whole class as I found low confidence was an issue across the whole group, rather than just with boys, and I was interested about the impact of the strategies I was to implement on the entire group rather than on just a select few.
Baseline data
Based on my own observations within my classroom, I found that at the start of the year, pupils were reluctant to talk in the classroom. Regardless of the seating plan, they generally did not want to speak publicly or to a partner. Due to this observational data, and with the Spoken Language element of the English GCSE looming, I decided to carry out my initial pupil voice questionnaire to discover the reasoning behind this reticence and also to gauge which oracy strategies might help them. The findings were as follows:
Strategies to implement in order to boost confidence and attainment in Spoken Language Presentations in class:
- Allow students to work with someone on some activities that they feel comfortable with in order to boost confidence in talking in the class and create a safe space for students to get ideas wrong and help each other
- Chunk up speech sentence openers more and get students to say one section at a time rather than a whole paragraph
- Using writing to speech, rather than oracy to writing in order to help students construct their thoughts and ideas before saying them aloud. Use whiteboards in order to do this to make the drafting process easier.
- Introduce some strategies for appearing confident/overcoming nerves in order to boost confidence, such as eye contact, posture, using gesture, body language awareness, voice projection and breathing techniques
- Allow more thinking time before oracy activities
- Listen to students’ individual speeches in order to give some feedback to boost students’ confidence that what they are doing is right
NB: I think that a long term plan would be to consider ways of making the classroom feel more of a safe environment for students to feel confident in talking to anyone in the class, especially to boost resilience, but for this class I think it is more useful to focus on short term confidence boosting strategies so that they know there are people in the audience that they can rely on to support them rather than expecting them to feel very confident talking in front of the whole class at this stage. Perhaps looking forwards I could look at building trust in oracy strategies and the importance of classroom culture as a foundation for oracy activities.
Intervention & intended impact
I implemented a number of strategies in the classroom in a week of preparation for the students’ Spoken Language GCSE presentations. I introduced the use of whiteboards for drafting writing to then use to speak aloud in practise. I also utilised a writing frame that the pupils were already confident with to help them to structure their speeches. In addition to this, I chunked up the writing process with speech sentence openers as well as letting pupils choose to work with those that they felt more comfortable with.
The pupils were working towards being in a position where they were confident enough with their speeches to transfer their scripts to 50 words of notes. I found, however, that once they had extended version of what they were going to say written down, they realised that because they didn’t need to adhere exactly to ‘scripts’, they could focus on their improvised presentational oracy skills. The scripting process simply served as a vehicle to deliver the students to this level of confidence.
I hoped to achieve a class of students who felt more confident at the thought of presenting their speeches at the end of the week that they had done at the start.
Impact data
The types of data I collected were as follows:
- Pupil voice questionnaires
- Teacher observation
- Pupil progress data
A comparison of the two Pupil Voice Questionnaires is as follows:
It is clear that the students’ confidence on the whole increased from below five to above five, and so clear progress can be seen in the pupils’ opinions of their progress in confidence.
63% of pupils in the second graph were above 5/10 for confidence in talking to the person next to them after the week of intervention, compared to 58% in the one previously. There was nobody who said 1/10 in the follow up questionnaire which was useful to know.
Most students said five and above for having sentence openers and vocabulary to help them increase their confidence.
Although not directly related to the writing process, this seemed to be a key factor for the progression in the students’ confidence in their Spoken Language presentations and in helping them to feel open to share their ideas for their speeches.
It is interesting that the students do not explicitly reference the writing to oracy strategies as being helpful in improving their confidence in their speeches. They focused in their comments on the practising process, which followed the writing process which was obviously a foundation to the speaking itself. They therefore may not have consciously registered the writing process as contributing to their confidence, or they may not have found it impacted their confidence at all. The students also seem to have found choosing to work with those they are comfortable with the most helpful factor in improving confidence in their speeches, so perhaps the social aspect had more of an impact on confidence than the writing to oracy strategies used. However, if the focus shifted to the quality of speeches produced, then the writing to oracy strategies definitely played a prominent part.
The students’ overall grades were 13 Merits and 11 Passes. In this class, I would have predicted that the majority of students would Pass, with a minority, perhaps three, gaining Merits. Although these grades are provisional, they suggest that the students not only gained confidence during the week to enable them to deliver their presentations effectively and in an engaging way, but what they had to say was clearly of a high enough quality for them to achieve these grades.
It is the vocabulary used and level of challenge in the choice of topic which seem to have the most impact on the grade in the mark scheme. These would have been determined by the writing strategies that formed the foundation of the speeches. This gives me the confidence to see that, although the Pupil Voice data does not directly reflect this, the students did benefit from the writing to oracy strategies.
Research Ethics
I did not encounter any clear ethical concerns in my research project as I was going to teach the topic anyway, and the students had such a poor foundation for confidence in oracy that they needed some sort of teacher intervention to prepare them for their Spoken Language GCSE.
Evaluation
Here is my review of my original action plan:
Achieved:
- Allow students to work with someone on some activities that they feel comfortable with in order to boost confidence in talking in the class and create a safe space for students to get ideas wrong and help each other
- Chunk up speech sentence openers more and get students to say one section at a time rather than a whole paragraph
- Using writing to speech, rather than oracy to writing in order to help students construct their thoughts and ideas before saying them aloud. Use whiteboards in order to do this to allow for the drafting process more easily too.
Partially achieved (reasons given in brackets):
- Introduce some strategies for appearing confident/overcoming nerves in order to boost confidence, such as eye contact, posture, using gesture, body language awareness, voice projection and breathing techniques. (I could have done more on this if I’d had more time than one week).
- Allow more thinking time before oracy activities. (It was very unstructured by the end as students were all at different stages of practising and writing so it wasn’t as focussed on allowing thinking time as they had as much thinking time as they needed in the drafting process).
- Listen to students’ individual speeches in order to give some feedback to boost students’ confidence that what they are doing is right. (I listened to some individual speeches but not many in class time as I was working with a select few students for various reasons, e.g. absence, SEN, those who had lost notes and needed to start again).
The sentence openers and whiteboards worked well for the group and therefore I will be using them in oracy activities in the future where appropriate. The students clearly needed to write down ideas before saying them aloud so this will definitely inform my planning of oracy activities with this class. I can then use writing as a foundation for exploratory as well as presentational talk.
Also, I will probably allow students to choose who they work with in the future as this worked particularly well with engagement in the tasks during the project. The barriers in talking to those next to them were removed, so they were looking forward to getting on with the task. In terms of building resilience and a culture of talk in the classroom, I will consider talking to them more about linking skills in the workplace to the tasks we will do. We are about to read a play as a class, so I will ask students to read and will also do small group readings.