Oracy

At Bourn we value children’s verbal communication skills. The four strands of oracy are embedded in everything we do, both academically and socially. The four strands are as follows: 

In class, we ensure that children are given a wide range of opportunities to talk to their peers and collaborate in groups across all of the subjects. We model these rules for exploratory talk (taken from Oracy Cambridge) explicitly so that the children know what is expected from them and they work hard to elicit the best from each other.

A big part of our focus as a school is on developing vocabulary. We do this through explicitly teaching and pre-teaching a wide range of vocabulary across all subject areas and ensuring that this vocabulary is regularly repeated as this is proven to best establish a word in our pupil’s long-term memory.

To develop their knowledge and understanding when they come across new words, etymology and morphology (focusing on prefixes and suffixes) is also taught.

At Bourn, we ensure that we are teaching children how to use their voice effectively as well as their body language enabling them to get their point across in the best possible way. To do this we work with the children to develop their pace of speaking, tonal variation, clarity of pronunciation, voice projection as well as gesture & posture and facial expression & eye contact.

Oracy can enhance pupils’ ability to communicate with greater clarity and effectiveness, help build vocabulary, help improve spelling, support a growth in confidence and self esteem, help retention of subject-specific knowledge, help transferring comprehension or reasoning skills into other subject areas and boost attainment scores in English, mathematics and science. This means we are really passionate about ensuring that it is embedded in everything that we do.