This is one of the most interesting, potentially powerful and new concepts being promoted in educational circles in the UK. It is the result of extensive work by Robin Alexander and others (Alexander, 2000, Alexander, 2005). This approach to oracy in the classroom raises the profile of talk, speaking and lis- tening, from the poor relation of English in the National Curriculum, to become the central focus, the pivot of learning across the curriculum.
Alexander’s work is a prompt for the greater awareness, for the growing importance of talk in the classroom. However, it is clear from his research that many classrooms in England lack the authentic dialogue to promote true learn- ing, where talk lacks the status it has elsewhere in Europe.
We registered a clear difference …. mainly in England and Michigan, in which there was much informal conversation, a great deal of reading and writing, but relatively little structured talk. (Alexander, 2000, p. 427)
Alexander goes on to suggest that the ethos of many classrooms does not pro- mote proper dialogue:
as extrapolated from observation in English classrooms, the research empha- sised pupils’ strategies for providing the ‘right’ answer and for avoiding being singled out if they did not know it. English pupils, in this characterisa- tion at least, are individuals struggling to survive in the crowd. The context within which mistakes are admissible, as in the Russian classrooms, greatly reduces this element of gamesmanship. Here communicative competence is defined as answering well as much as answering correctly. This explains the apparent paradox of why, although the climate of Russian classrooms tends to be viewed by Western observers as authoritarian, even oppressive, Russian pupils are eager to answer questions while in the supposedly more demo- cratic climate of English classrooms they may be reluctant to do so.
(Alexander, 2000, pp. 457–8)
From his own and others’ research, he summarises the picture of classrooms’
negative aspects of speaking and listening, particularly primary, as follows:
the low level of cognitive demand in many classroom questions; the continu- ing prevalence of questions which remain closed despite our claims to be interested in fostering more open forms of enquiry; the habitual and perhaps unthinking use of bland all purpose praise rather than feedback of the kind which diagnoses and informs; the seeming paradox of pupils working every- where in groups but rarely as groups; the rarity of autonomous pupil-led discussion and problem-solving; and the tendency of classrooms to be places of risk and ambiguity rather than security and clarity, in which pupils devise strategies to cope and get by rather than engage. (Alexander, 2005, p. 14) In schools too often speaking and listening is seen as question and answer, usually the teacher questioning and the pupils answering. What we see in class- rooms is very often the IRF approach, where the teacher initiates, a child responds and a teacher gives feedback. Here’s one teacher describing how this limited exchange works: ‘A colleague, observing me, pointed out that I have a technique, which I was not aware of, where, if I ask a question and I do not get the right answer, I rephrase the question, making it simpler and can repeat that simplification until they do get it,’ describing this as if it were good practice.
This approach limits the pupil’s speaking and listening engagement with the teacher, as well as preventing engaging with, and listening to, other pupils. We need to see pupils initiating the talk much more with pupils asking questions rather than the teacher.
Too often talk is this ‘recitation’ (Alexander, 2005, p. 34) where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions. The resulting class- room games include:
● guessing what is in the teacher’s head – pupils avoiding having to answer the question
● linguistic tennis – where it is about getting rid of the ball quickly not about developing an exchange of ideas
● point scoring – getting the answers right or getting them wrong and feeling a failure.
Speaking does involve risk but pupils should be encouraged to take that risk knowing that making a mistake is not a problem but part of the learning
process; classrooms must be supportive communities where pupils risk opening up and do not have the fear that shuts them down. We need to encourage a culture of ‘failing safely’, where not ‘getting it right’ first time is recognised as part of the process.
This lack of proper talk is all the more serious as it is clear that the primary school years are critical in the development of the brain:
It is now recognised that the period between 3/4 and 10/11 – the primary phase of schooling, more or less – is one in which the brain in effect restruc- tures itself, building cells, making new connections, developing a capacity for learning, memory, emotional response and language, all on a scale which decreases markedly thereafter. (Alexander, 2005, p. 12)
Talk, being central to the development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom. He identifies its key elements as:
● Collective: teachers and pupils address learning tasks together, as a group or as a class;
● Reciprocal: teachers and pupils listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints;
● Supportive: pupils articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrass- ment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings;
● Cumulative: teachers and pupils build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and inquiry;
● Purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals.
(Alexander, 2005, pp. 26–7)
Drama shares the elements listed above, and it promotes pupils’ thinking because of the quality, dynamics and content of talk that can develop.
Why is drama so powerful in promoting good talk? It is about pupils having the desire to speak rather than being required to speak.
Alexander, in examining current research in the use of dialogical teaching, highlights three areas that are essential for the achievement of authentic dia- logue but which are very demanding and more difficult for teachers to achieve in ordinary classroom settings. They are:
● Learning talk and teaching talk – the achievement of understanding what the child says matters at least as much as what the teacher says.
● Is extended talk dialogical teaching? – pupils’ answers and other contribu- tions are becoming longer, but do these necessarily add up to a dialogue?
● Form and content – how can we best ensure that classroom talk is cumula- tive and purposeful as well as collective, reciprocal and supportive?
(Alexander, 2005, p. 44)
As for the first, within a drama pupils are often given the status they do not have in a normal classroom by the role they adopt; in addition, the teacher’s role is often inferior to the pupils’. For example, in the drama ‘The Wild Thing’ the main teacher role is the little boy Max, where the pupils are the experts from How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening 43
Lost & Found, the missing persons agency. In one run of the drama pupils used their role to point out the error of Max’s ways, asserting, You are only 7 and must listen more to your mother, at the same time making clear that they saw their role as adults and the teacher’s role as only a little boy. This gives pupils confidence in speaking and they see that their contributions matter a great deal. In this way we structure into a drama the very possibility of pupils’ talk mattering.
The second concern, the question of whether ‘extended talk is dialogical teaching’ is important to reflect upon in drama because poorly managed dramas can lack direction as much as any discussion. However, if the drama is properly planned and focused, if the learning objective is clear, then we have the capacity for the dialogue to be at its most purposeful.
‘Form and content’ are central to the planning of drama. The drama itself provides a form which ensures that the pupils are part of a context with roles that always have direction, often a problem to solve, a person to help, and with strategies and structure that ensure a framework for the language. Thus they have a very definite purpose.
As the drama develops the pupils develop as a community on the basis of the shared experience. That in itself provides a cumulative language world which is very rich and where the pupils, if the drama engages properly, care in a way that promotes collective, reciprocal and supportive talk. So drama is a more coherent approach to teaching talk.
We would maintain that drama is more effective in developing pupils’ ways of thinking, ways of understanding, than ordinary classroom discussion because the language of drama, as the language of all artistic creation, is a heightened version of the language of everyday talk. The reason for this is that drama utilises a new context, a fictional world which is parallel to reality, but in which the uses of language can be as rich and varied as we want. Its useful- ness to speaking and listening, and thus language development, is that we create together a shared experience which frames the language and makes us, the pupils and the teacher, communicate more effectively than mere discussion ever can. That shared experience is more effective because, when we discuss in any other form, we can only talk to each other from our separate realities. Most discussions begin with a stimulus of some sort. This can be a picture, a story, a topic. The limits are that each person sees the stimulus from their own reality;
their experiences colour the way they see it. No one person has the same expe- rience of that stimulus and consequently we are limited in how we understand it because of the baggage we bring with us. This is particularly true for older primary pupils, ages 7–11, who can bring more separate experiences than younger pupils and are often starting their discussion with greater gaps between them, preventing their chances of shared understandings.
Very often in discussion pupils are not really listening to each other because they are more concerned about what they want to say than what they can learn from other pupils. In discussion it can be seen as a very valuable thing to share personal experiences, but how valuable are those experiences to other members of the group, who do not know anything about that experience except what the person relating it tells them? In contrast, communication within the drama is based on the shared world that we are creating together.
All of the pupils still bring ideas and opinions from their separate experiences, but they are all remade by the creation of a new context.
Drama produces greater motivation for the pupils, motivation because of their interest in the problem-solving of the drama. They become more confi- dent. They are often feeling so motivated to speak that they find new voice.
At the time that this chapter was being written the sort of excitement and interest that drama generates could be seen in a group of training teachers preparing roles for drama. They were very much taken with the creation of the roles, with the new possibilities, motivated by the creative act, such that, although they were being assessed on the preparation of these roles, their enjoyment and motivation, focus and concentration were high-level.
Drama gives the pupils plenty of opportunities to think through speaking and listening. It promotes speech from the pupils because they want to speak, not because they are being asked to speak. Drama sets up more fluid situations with more possibilities. Mistakes can be made and looked at because any partic- ular stage of the drama can be reworked to make it work better for us. In fact the making of mistakes is seen as part of the learning, a major part of helping to negotiate the meaning and to create the drama itself.