The impact of conversational scaffolds and targeted groupings on supporting Year 10 pupils’ confidence in sustaining academic dialogue.
Isabel Stokes
Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Secondary)
Abstract
This article investigates how teachers can support Key Stage 4 students’ confidence in sustaining academic dialogue with peers during a period when collaborative learning often declines due to high‑stakes examination pressures. Drawing on the Initial teacher training: core content framework (ITT: CCT DfE, 2024) and Vygotskian principles of scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), this action research project explores whether conversational scaffolds and targeted groupings can enhance students’ confidence with classroom talk. Using an interpretivist paradigm, qualitative data were collected through scene analyses, conversational menus, evaluation sheets, and observations during a Macbeth discussion sequence. Thematic analysis revealed that most students experienced increased confidence, particularly due to the structured support provided by conversational menus, though limitations emerged as group sizes increased. The findings highlight the need to normalise spoken language at KS4 and suggest that carefully designed scaffolds can foster more confident peer-to-peer dialogue.
Introduction
The Initial teacher training: core content framework (ITT: CCF) (Department for Education, 2024) states initial teacher trainees should learn that ‘high quality classroom talk can support pupils to articulate key ideas, consolidate understanding and extend their vocabulary’ (p. 18). While this statement emphasises how oracy can facilitate learning outcomes, it fails to acknowledge how student confidence when engaging in ‘classroom talk’ is also an important factor in achieving them. From my personal experiences while on placement, I have noticed a significant shift in pedagogy between Key Stage 3 (KS3) and Key Stage 4 (KS4) that results in a decline in collaborative ways of working in subject English during exam preparation; this leaves little opportunity for the ‘classroom talk’ the CCF deems important. Herein lies the genesis of my research interest: how can I support students’ confidence in sustaining dialogue with their peers at KS4 during a period when collaborative ways of working anecdotally become practised less?
Voice 21 (Our Mission, 2024), a charitable organisation committed to improving oracy in schools in disadvantaged areas, defines oracy as ‘the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language’ (n. p.). This definition provides a useful framework for situating my research interest. The Bullock Report (1975) was the watershed moment for championing the importance of oracy within schools; it recommended that every secondary school in the UK should adopt a speaking and listening curriculum. More recently, the national curriculum(Department for Education, 2014) also highlights the centrality of oracy as not only important in subject English, but also in pupils becoming enfranchised members of society. Yet, Ofsted’s (2024) recent subject English report deemed that ‘schools (often) do not consider spoken language well in their curriculum’ (n. p.). Despite a small sample size of only 25 schools, limiting the generalisability of Ofsted’s findings, it nevertheless articulated a tension between the ‘planned curriculum’ and the ‘curriculum as enacted’ (Alexander et al., 2010, p. 250). This tension further evidences the need to research ways to support oracy in the classroom.
Mercer and Dawes (2024) observe that oracy in schools is also highly politicised, and therefore variable across different school systems. Their argument assumes that spoken language is more of a priority in the private sector’s curriculum through debates and public speaking events, because this is the sector most often responsible for educating the politicians of the future. Mercer and Dawes (2024) continue by emphasising how the reverse is true in state education, and suggest this is why oracy is on the periphery in the comprehensive classroom. Furthermore, current Prime Minister Keir Starmer (2023) used oracy as the bargaining chip in his electoral bid: ‘[I will] commit a Labour government to make oracy a priority at all stages of education – so that every young person leaves school with the confidence and skills to use their voice to overcome barriers and make the most of their lives’ (n. p.). Regardless of whether Starmer has brought this to fruition or not, his statement explicitly links spoken language with the notion of ‘confidence’, which is relevant for my small-scale action research.
Research aims
The aim of this article is not to measure students’ learning when engaging in ‘classroom talk’ (CCF, 2024). Instead, this piece aims to explore ways teachers can support their KS4 students’ confidence when talking to their peers in the classroom. In a climate where collaborative teaching strategies are in decline at KS4 due to high stakes examination pressures, I will argue it is students’ confidence with spoken language that needs to be normalised in the classroom before oracy can be used as a tool for learning. My approach is fundamentally a Vygotskyan one. Vygotsky’s (Mitchell, 2017) theorisation of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) states that ‘what the child can do today with the help of adults, it will be able to carry out tomorrow on its own’ (p. 366). By using scaffolds and pre-planning student groupings, I will investigate whether these measures can help my students feel more confident talking to each other in an English classroom setting. If the results are promising, I may continue to use these strategies in my future practice at all key stage levels.
Literature Review
‘The romantic notion that teachers need not focus on knowledge and instead turn their attention to developing creativity or communication skills has gripped many countries around the world’ (Gibb, 2017).
The above has been taken from the speech, ‘The importance of knowledge-based education’ (2017), where Gibb, the Conservative Minister for Education at the time, dismisses ‘creativity and communication skills’ as a ‘romantic notion’. This reveals his view that collaborative ways of working in the classroom are highly idealised. His speech praises direct instruction and teacher-led pedagogical styles which, for Gibb (2017), are the best way to impart knowledge. This is a myopic view of what schooling should be. Bleiman (2017) directly responds to Gibb in her article of the same year, wondering ‘whether those who are so critical of group work are fully aware of the vital role that the teacher must play to make it really effective’ (n. p.). Gibb’s (2017) speech engenders a dichotomy between teacher-led and student-led classroom approaches, which is also dominant in much of the existing research surrounding approaches to oracy and group work. However, Bleiman (2017) convincingly negotiates between these polarities to suggest it is the complex interweaving of teacher-led and student-led modes of teaching that are the most successful for promoting student collaboration. Moreover, Alexander’s (2020) theorisation of the ‘pedagogical repertoire’ reinforces this view by highlighting how no singular pedagogy is suitable all of the time. Alexander (2020) emphasises how each classroom is unique and only the teacher has the capacity to use their professional judgement to decide on the teaching practice best suited at any given moment. This further resolves the apparent dichotomy between student-led and teacher-led approaches that Gibb (2017) staunchly enforces.
My research into whether conversational scaffolds and targeted groupings can support Year 10 pupils’ confidence in sustaining academic dialogue with each other necessarily draws upon a blended approach between teacher-led and student-led practice. In the context of schooling, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (Aubin, 2022) defines scaffolding as ‘a metaphor for temporary support that is removed when it is no longer required [and provides] enough support so that pupils can successfully complete tasks that they [can] not yet do independently’ (n. p.). Therefore, scaffolding is teacher implemented and used as a tool to support students. Yet, most crucially, scaffolding must be gradually removed as students grow more independent, or in the case of my research, more confident. Vygotsky’s (Barrs, 2021) ZPD intersects with scaffolding through the term ‘proximal’; tasks should not be too challenging from students’ current capabilities such that they will not succeed. Similarly, tasks should not be too easy to complete in line with current capabilities, or else boredom will ensue. Barrs’ (2021) research on bringing more faithful translations of Vygotsky’s original work to light has been invaluable in re-centring the importance of his theories in the field of constructivist pedagogies, and are essential in my own research. Unlike behaviourist pedagogies that emphasise passive learning and rote teaching (Skinner, 1974), constructivist pedagogies place the student at the centre, whereby learning takes place through them constructing their own understanding of the learning. By using conversational scaffolds, I aim to create a ZPD for my students to facilitate their dialogue with each other. Dialogue originates from the Ancient Greek dialogos (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.),meaning to engage in ‘conversation’; the exchanging of ideas between two or more people. Exchange is an important factor here. For my research, it is vital students not only offer their ideas through the mode of spoken language, but also that they can employ these ideas in an exchange with their peers.
Maloch’s (2002) research into how teachers can scaffold student talk is a critical example of the difference between ‘classroom talk’ and classroom dialogue. While Maloch’s research predates smart phones and COVID-19, which both dramatically shifted the educational landscape, their 2002 definition between talk and dialogue remains a productive one. They conducted a five-month qualitative study of teacher-student interactions in a fourth-grade classroom, which is equivalent to Key Stage 2 (KS2) in the English schooling system. Although the research is from a different, USA-based context and focusses on a younger group of students, its results are translatable. The teacher scaffolded the students’ ‘classroom talk’ by directing them to read a certain number of pages of a book and write down their comments and questions prior to meeting with their discussion groups. One of Maloch’s (2002) key findings was that this led to students sharing their written comments with each other and engaging in discussions around those topics. In relation to my own action research, this result is promising as it suggests that teacher scaffolding of student conversations can support peer-to-peer dialogue. However, as the discussion groups grew in size, the peer-to-peer dialogue was replaced by a round-robin discussion where students took it in turns to talk about their own ideas without connecting these to those of their peers and questioning each other. Therefore, this research (Maloch, 2022) also highlights the limitations of teacher scaffolding when student groupings grow larger.
Charmaz (2013) is sceptical about conducting a literature review before primary research and data collection because they suggest it leads to preconceptions and bias that can skew the findings. However, in this content, the research into ways of supporting student oracy is sparse and tends to focus more on measuring learning as opposed to investigating how to foster confidence. Therefore, conducting a literature review before my own study has revealed how my research is filling a gap. Moreover, most of the pre-existing research tends to focus on higher education students or KS3 and KS2 students, which serves to further suggest collaborative ways of working sharply decline during KS4. For example, Lim, Shin, Lee et al. (2024) focus on science students at Seoul National University. Students were split into two groups: a group of students without a teacher and a group of students with a teacher. Both groups carried out discussions on their work. The non-teacher group had to sustain the conversation themselves whereas the teacher-led group relied on the teacher to call upon students. Again, this South Korean research (Lim, Shin, Lee et al., 2024) is less relevant to my own interest area through its focus on older students and a non-English schooling system. Lim, Shin, Lee et al.’s (2024) findings conclude that students in the group without the teacher were more engaged in the task than the group with the teacher, thus these findings align with the student-led versus teacher-led dichotomy that Gibb (2017) promotes in his speech by representing the figure of the teacher as being dominant or completely absent. The research does not acknowledge the confidence levels of the students taking part in the study, further limiting its use in my own investigation.
By comparison, Reynolds and Townsend (2018) reject the binary choice between teacher-led and student-led pedagogies; their research findings show it is how the teacher can be used to facilitate talk between students that proves the most effective in developing students’ confidence, evidenced through participation. They investigated two discussion groups during a high-school English lesson: one where the teacher directed the conversation and one where the teacher jumped in to aid the conversation when students needed help sustaining dialogue with each other. Their findings revealed the latter proved more effective for the quality of the conversations. However, the focus of this research was on the quality of the ‘classroom talk’ and measuring alignment with learning outcomes, as opposed to fostering confidence levels, but its results are nevertheless promising for indicating the value of teacher support during student-led oracy tasks.
In addition to the ‘pedagogical repertoire’ (Alexander, 2020) being a useful tool for negotiating the dichotomy of student-led and teacher-led approaches, Alexander (2013) also states that ‘confidence cannot be pursued in isolation [from] the acquisition of ideas to articulate’ (p. 28). This implies that confidence and content reciprocally reinforce each other. Similarly, Knight’s Classroom Talk in Practice: Experiences of Oracy in Action (2022) makes three pivotal arguments in favour of classroom oracy: it fosters communicative competence that sets pupils up for later life; it centralises the student voice; it can be a vehicle for learning. Knight’s (2022) third argument aligns with Alexander’s (2013) emphasis on the quality of the talk, but only implicitly discusses the role confidence plays in students’ ability to engage and exchange ideas to meet learning outcomes.
Moreover, there is a theoretical trend in educational research into oracy (Wood, 2017) that assumes students need at least a surface level of knowledge and understanding before being confident to undertake more creative tasks; this is an argument in favour of direct instruction and rote learning. Wood (2017) investigated this claim by collecting data on Year 9 students’ preferred modes of learning Macbeth (Shakespeare, 2014 / 1606)for the first time. The ‘emergent picture was that […] students […] reported liking the more teacher-led approach’ (p. 322). These findings support Alexander’s (2013) claim that students need to acquire ideas before having the confidence to use these during ‘classroom talk’ and that direct instruction must precede increased student autonomy. These findings are valuable for my own research project because I have based my design on knowledge students have already acquired, as confidence is the variable I am interested in investigating, as opposed to knowledge acquisition or learning outcomes. Lastly, the EEF’s (2021) ongoing research into collaborative learning approaches has found that student-led classroom practices can have a positive impact on confidence and learning, but only when supported well by a teacher. Therefore, it is vital to explore how teacher scaffolds can support student-to-student dialogue in a bid to further negotiate between Gibb’s (2017) pedagogical dichotomy.
Methodology
Throughout my research I was interested in the following questions: how can I improve KS4 students’ confidence with oracy in the classroom; what is the impact of scaffolding on student motivation and engagement; does student-led dialogue as opposed to teacher-led have a greater impact on confidence levels; how can I facilitate academic dialogue between students in the classroom? Due to confidence being an intrinsic and subjective quality, it was beneficial for me to adopt an interpretivist research paradigm (Farrow, Iniesto, Weller, & Pitt, 2020) when designing my study as opposed to a positivist one (Farrow, Iniesto, Weller, & Pitt, 2020). Positivism is founded upon scientific, ontological facts. This was an unsuitable approach to apply to this research because it is qualitative, not quantitative, in its design. On the other hand, interpretivism is founded upon the idea that there are some factors of the human experience that can never be objectively known, like feelings such as confidence, rendering it the most suitable research paradigm herein.
Returning to the CCF (2024), the guidance also states that ITTs must learn that ‘paired and group activities can increase pupil success, but to work together effectively pupils need guidance, support and purpose’ (p. 17): my research design aimed to practise this. By providing my Year 10 students based in a comprehensive school in North East Lincolnshire with conversational scaffolds and pre-grouping the students based on social dynamics and attainment, I aimed to create an environment where student-to-student dialogue could take place with little input from me as the teacher. Students began by analysing an extract from Macbeth, which were handed out at random. I only selected extracts from the parts of the play we had studied so far, and did so for two reasons: first, confidence with dialogue is the variable I was interested in measuring as opposed to student learning; it did not matter that students were already familiar with the extracts; and second, there is evidence (Wood, 2017) to suggest that students can only begin to be more creative and self-directed once they have achieved at least a surface level of understanding as instructed by the teacher. Therefore, by allowing students to analyse an extract from the play they were already familiar with as a basis for their conversations, it removed the potential barrier of unfamiliarity and was more conducive to promoting increased confidence levels.
Students used their individual analyses of the extracts to complete a conversational menu that enabled them to organise their ideas in preparation for engaging in small discussion groups with their peers. This was inspired by Muir’s (2023) use of a conversational menu in their research on the role of dialogic approaches and drama-based praxis in developing teacher identities.
The following lesson, I displayed the student groupings on the board and students were tasked with using their conversational menus to talk to each other about their analyses for two minutes each. I enlarged the groups from pairs to quartets to, finally, two large groups of approximately fourteen students each. As the groupings grew in size, students were encouraged to ask each other questions to sustain the dialogue about Macbeth using the question prompts printed on their menus. Following their discussions, students evaluated how their confidence levels had changed following the lesson and why, which has formed the data set for my findings and analysis. I will use thematic analysis to scrutinize my data as it lends itself best to understanding qualitative data that is based on participants’ written and spoken accounts (Lochmiller, 2021). This will allow me to identify trends and outliers that will ultimately form the evidence-base in favour of or in opposition to my research question.
Due to the research being designed to take place over the course of two lessons on two consecutive days, absence between the lessons was a potential limiting factor for which contingencies had to be in place. For the one student who was absent during the extract analysis and conversational menu lesson, I directed them to a scene they had heavily annotated in their exercise book during prior learning and provided them with a blank conversational menu to fill in at the beginning of the second lesson; this way they could still participate in dialogue with their peers. Moreover, as previously discussed, to be able to discuss Macbeth students required at least a surface-level understanding of the play beforehand, making the logistics of this research dependent on content from previous lessons. As a result of the research being centred around oracy and peer-to-peer dialogue, it was also important to consider how this would impact on students with English as an additional language (EAL) in the class. One sixth of the class selected for the research were EAL. Yet, it was also a high attaining class, meaning the EAL students were ‘Band E’ on the Levels of Proficiency in English (The Bell Foundation , n.d.), indicating strong levels of fluency. However, if the same methodology was applied to a class with EAL students who have a lesser degree of fluency in the English language, this would be more of a significant limiting factor and is therefore something to consider for the future.
There are also significant ethical implications when involving EAL students in the research. By encouraging these students to speak in front of their peers using their second language, regardless of fluency, it has the potential to cause anxiety. The same is true of any of the students participating in the research who might find the prospect of talking in front of others daunting. In accordance with The British Education Research Association’s (BERA) (2024) ethical guidelines, I completed the Bishop Grosseteste University PGCE Secondary Ethics Clearance Form before conducting my research. I detailed the potential risk factors associated with the research and it was approved both by the school-based and university-based mentors. The ethics form also encouraged me to consider how I would approach my potential participants and collect their data in an anonymised way. BERA (2024) recommends that ‘opt-in procedures for gaining consent are preferred’ (n. p.) due to the imbalance of power between teacher and student that has the potential to create a sense of coercion to participate in the study. Thus, when collecting my research, I included a tick-box at the top of my research artefacts that students could choose to tick by way of giving their consent to participate. The data of the students who consented to take part in the research is discussed in the following section.
Findings: A Thematic Analysis
The data are complex because there are three artefacts – scene analyses, conversational menus, evaluation sheets – that need to be taken into consideration as well as my observations of the social dynamics around the room during my research collection. Upon first glance, there are strong positive trends in the data that would suggest targeted groupings and conversational scaffolds can indeed support student confidence when engaging in academic dialogue with each other. However, the data also reveals some interesting outliers that provide essential points for consideration when trying to a foster a culture of oracy in the KS4 classroom in the future.
While roving the room during students’ paired conversations with each other, I observed that students were consistently on the topic of Macbeth and conversations did not stray from the assigned task. This suggests that the targeted groupings worked effectively because students were conversing with each other about the text as intended. As the groups grew in size to the two larger groups, I also observed that there were a handful of students in each who assumed leadership roles, encouraging their peers to use the question prompts on the conversational menus to sustain their discussions. I predicted this would happen: I carefully selected students who are typically most vocal during lessons and deliberately split them over the two groupings. Moreover, when grouping students, I also considered the seating plan pairs who already worked effectively with each other and kept them the same. However, one student revealed that they would only like to do more talking activities in lessons if they were able ‘to either choose partners or not be paired with [their] seating partners’. Therefore, despite conversations seeming effective to me as an onlooker, there is also evidence to suggest that students may not have enjoyed working with peers outside of their social groups, perhaps necessitating greater student autonomy when selecting groupings in the future.
21 out of the 27 students who consented to taking part in the research stated that their confidence when talking to their peers had improved following the discussion lesson compared with their confidence levels prior. The descriptive statistic is insufficient here, though; it is vital to consider why this occurred. As with any interpretivist research paradigm (Farrow, Iniesto, Weller, & Pitt, 2020), my observations of the success of targeted groupings are necessarily subjective, but data collected from students further supports the assertion that scaffolding can support student confidence when engaging in academic dialogue with each other. One student stated that before the lesson ‘I wasn’t that confident[…] because Shakespeare isn’t my thing and sometimes I struggle with it [but after the lesson] my confidence has increased because it has given me chance to talk, be heard and also be questioned for my information’. Here, the student cites the opportunity for talk in the first place as being a central factor in their increased confidence, which reinforces the pattern in KS4 subject English education where student oracy is marginalised in favour of examination preparation. The student went on to express a desire to do more speaking activities in lessons because it ‘let me speak to my peers’. This suggests that the very act of talking in itself was valuable for this student and their confidence levels, indicating a need for teachers to allow more time for these activities in the English classroom.
Yet, the predominant factor across the data of students who experienced increased confidence following the research was the value of the conversational menu. Research (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021) into the impact of collaborative learning approaches has found that the role of scaffolding is vital, which is a finding that is replicated here. Student responses in favour of the conversational menus supporting their increased confidence stated reasons ranging from it ‘giving them something to read off’ to structuring the direction of their conversations with their peers. One student in particular reflected that ‘it gave me the confidence to deliver my speech’, implying that the conversational menu was critical for their increased confidence with engaging in dialogue following the lesson.
These reflections culminate to indicate the efficacy of the menu for supporting students while undertaking a task that is novel and unfamiliar and suggests the success of constructing a ZPD (Barrs, 2021), where students were aided just enough to complete the task at hand. This data is favourable as it supports the research question and suggests that conversational scaffolds can indeed support student confidence when engaging in academic dialogue with each other. However, as Reynolds and Townsend’s (2018) research also pointed out, the extent to which teachers should scaffold and at what point the scaffolding should be removed is a vexed question and my data simultaneously reveals some of the limitations of the conversational menu.
4 out of the 27 students found the conversational menu limiting in some way. One student found it useful for closed questions but not when answering more exploratory, open questions, suggesting that the menu is a good springboard but does not account for the spontaneity of conversations once they are in progress. Another student’s reflections emphasise this point by stating ‘it was useful in the smaller groups as it allowed us to start our discussions about the play but it [was] quite imposing in the larger groups’, which is similar to what Maloch’s (2002) research revealed. Both of these views do not negate the use of the conversational menus completely, but they do illuminate some significant limitations of the menu once conversations are in progress, suggesting there is a point of diminishing returns in terms of scaffolding and pre-planning conversations because they are necessarily transient and spontaneous (Ainy, 2022).
In contrast to the data that supports the value of targeted groupings and conversational scaffolds for supporting student confidence when engaging in academic dialogue with each other, 4 students stated their confidence levels were already quite high and remained the same following the research; 2 admitted to having low confidence and this remaining unchanged despite the scaffolding in place. Of the two students with unchanged low confidence, the first reflected that they dislike talking in front of others regardless of the support in place, foregrounding there are social factors at play outside of the educational support at hand, which is a variable I failed to consider before conducting the research. The second student disclosed their struggles with a stutter and low self-esteem following the research: ‘I was not confident at all due to my stutter and I am bad at explaining things’. Both of these pieces of data foreground ethical considerations (BERA, 2024) that must be considered when conducting this type of research into oracy. They also reinforce the intrinsic and subjective nature of confidence, making it difficult to measure and have a measurable impact upon. This in turn reinforces the appropriateness of an interpretivist research paradigm (Farrow, Iniesto, Weller, & Pitt, 2020).
Even though some data challenges the efficacy of scaffolding student-to-student dialogue, the same data also raises an interesting point that should be considered in future practice and in future research: speaking and listening are dialectically related, as Voice 21’s (2024) definition of ‘oracy’ highlights. The same student that dislikes talking in front of others and therefore did not experience an increase in confidence went on to reflect that, despite their personal struggles, they still liked hearing what their peers’ ideas were. This emphasises how measuring and researching student dialogue cannot solely focus on the act of speaking, but how it must also consider the role listening plays, which The Bullock Report (1975) highlighted in an earlier era. Here, there is evidence to suggest that there is as much value in listening to one’s peers talk as talking to them. There is more data to support this claim, as another student cited their reason for wanting to do more activities like this in the future as being because ‘it generates more ideas and helps achieve a high level of understanding through seeing different views’. Here, reflections on the discussion lesson have moved beyond considering confidence levels and into considering the impact dialogue can have on learning, which would be a fruitful progression of the study now that evidence to suggest scaffolding can support student confidence has been obtained.
Recommendations and Conclusion
As with any small-scale action research project, the data collected is situational and context bound (Efron & Ravidlin, 2020): it is true of my participants and my participants only. The research must be repeated on a larger scale over a prolonged period of time to make the findings generalisable. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence to suggest that targeted groupings and conversational scaffolds can indeed support Year 10 pupils’ confidence in sustaining academic dialogue with each other. Moreover, the data has also revealed the potential future scope of the research by considering the impact of scaffolding on meeting learning outcomes as well as developing confidence levels. While social factors and the discrete nature of the conversational menu were found to be limiting in some cases, the results remain promising.
An interest in how to foster confidence with speaking in the KS4 English classroom does not end here. For students to become consistently confident with talking to their peers, oracy needs to be normalised within the classroom. Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development (1965) can be usefully applied here, as the model states true success when ‘performing’, or in this case ‘talking’, can only be achieved when a practice has been normalised. Therefore, in my own teaching practice, I need to incorporate tasks such as the one designed for this research into my ‘pedagogical repertoire’ (Alexander, 2020). Only then can there be a transition towards considering how ‘high quality classroom talk’ (CCF, 2024) can be used as tool for learning beyond fostering student confidence. In this vein, the more that oracy is practised in the classroom, scaffolds can be gradually removed (CCF, 2024), fulfilling Vygotsky’s (Mitchell, 2017) call for the child to eventually be independent in what they previously needed support for.
Ultimately, this research has shown that a teacher turning ‘their attention to developing creativity and communication skills’ is not a ‘romantic notion’ (Gibb, 2017). Oracy is a vital pillar of subject English and can be a pivotal tool for learning when student confidence with speaking and listening is secure and normalised.
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