Schools are full of talk; in every classroom, it’s a vital learning tool.
But because it’s ingrained in our lessons, and teachers are great at enabling talk, it is not usually considered necessary for staff to timetable it specifically.
And yet, talk is the key to success in life.
The majority of influential people are highly articulate; they convince, persuade, cajole and chastise in a wealth of spoken or written language appropriate to setting and need.
Those who, like myself, have taught much of their career in schools where various factors impact on pupils’ development of the accepted forms of English will know that achievement is significantly impacted by speech.
In areas of high deprivation, many children grow up in families that do not include at least one articulate talker. In some homes there isn’t a culture of engaging the young baby in “talk”, and children grow up almost entirely with business talk (in the terminology of Professor Todd Risley), with mainly abrupt questions, statements or orders, such as: “Come in!” “Go out!” “Shut up!” “Where’s your coat?”
These settings contribute towards the “word gap”: this is the difference between the number of words that children have heard spoken by the age of 3 or 4. There are many discussions around the causes, size and impact of this phenomenon. But wherever you stand in this debate, we need to all acknowledge that there is a word gap and that it can be a detriment to children’s ability to communicate.
The word gap: why teachers need to make time for talk
So how can we close this gap? Perhaps the key is not to use the term “gap” at all.
In 2015 psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek published the paper The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low-Income Children’s Language Success, in which she says we should be careful not to see this as a deficit model: “I like to talk about it as building a foundation rather than reducing a gap.”
When we talk about talk, then, we want all children to be confident and articulate talkers of the agreed Standard English. We need to use identified strategies to improve vocabulary, sentence structure, expression and dynamics while respecting and celebrating the many different codes of speech and empowering children to make informed choices about appropriate forms and usage.
School budgets are extremely tight and external pressures are forever increasing; leaders find it hard to justify investment in an abstract like talk when it is difficult to prove its impact on standards and achievement.
But we need to change the focus: it’s not an additional time budget that is needed but a whole-school plan to build talk activity effectively into lessons across the curriculum.
More teaching and learning:
Vocabulary really matters, and should be at the heart of these activities.
Today it is common to see criticism of the teaching of vocabulary as an objective in its own right, as vocabulary is not “language”. But it is the stepping stones of language - the roots that grow into a sturdy trunk with rich and varied stems as the child grows and matures.
Teaching new and often ambitious words can be fun and empowering. Spending 10 minutes during a lesson playing talk-based games is not expensive in time or money, and it provides the repetition of usage required to embed and understand new language.
And to further promote talk, termly celebrations of new knowledge from various subjects should become routine, with children identifying the learning they most enjoyed. They can prepare, edit and learn their own short paragraph on a chosen topic and practise its presentation. They should then present their oratory at end-of-term public speaking assemblies. Evidence of impact will be measurable in both their writing and their speech.
For all children, no matter their background or early experiences, talk is a gift that will improve their life chances.
Some children will become talkers, readers and writers, no matter what we do; most will not. It is our responsibility as educators to ensure that all have similar opportunities.
Ros Wilson is an education consultant and author of the Talk:Write programme.
