Speaking and Listening
The rise to prominence
If the subject of English itself has a vexed history then the place of Speaking and Listening within it remains complex and problematic. The importance of S&L in learning was recognised nearly 50 years ago and there was a brief ‘honeymoon period’ as a result. James Britton [1970], Douglas Barnes [1969] and others produced a remarkable body of work and research in the late 60s and early 70s that then influenced the Bullock Report and subsequently the setting up of the new GCSE examination available from 1984. In a sense S&L went from being absent from the curriculum to becoming potentially dominant in a brief period of 20 years. However there are some complications.
The era of the 60s and 70s were a period of radical social change both reflected in and partly caused by mass media developments such as television and popular music, the latter significantly altering the nature of radio listening. The issue of accent and dialect therefore became much more ‘audible’ and ‘visible’ compared to the long domination of BBC radio and Received Pronunciation. Around this time the sociologist Basil Bernstein was trying to describe the embedding of codes in spoken language and he theorised about the elaborated code of some speakers compared to others. His work has been much misrepresented. Another researcher, William Labov, spent time amongst the young black communities of New York and generated evidence showing that their spoken ‘codes’ were equally elaborate and capable of sophisticated meaning. This was an important corrective to popular misconceptions but rather overshadowed what Bernstein was partly demonstrating which was that certain spoken codes were embedded in powerful discourses and this included teachers and schools. [for a good overview see the chapter on Speaking and Listening in Andrews, 2001]. One reason such research was possible was because the portable tape recorder now provided a way to capture and then analyse speech. This technology allowed researchers like Douglas Barnes to record teacher pupil and pupil interaction for the first time and to examine minutely key pedagogies such as questioning. They helped James Britton to conceptualise the place of S&L in learning and to see it as the ‘missing link’ in pupil development.
Overall these complex and interacting developments brought S&L to rapid prominence. To some extent they also helped to demystify notions of accent and dialect turning them in to topics for study and understanding rather than competing discourses. There had been a strong tradition of oral work in the secondary modern school of the 1960s where the first forms of oral assessment were developed but the creating of the common examination, the GCSE gave oral work a huge boost in status and also demonstrated that S&L, like reading and writing, could and should be taught. This partly led to the development of a National Oracy Project in the late 80s and early 90s.
Speaking and listening – telling stories, recognising identity and gender
Two other strands accompany this ‘official status’. One was an interest in narrative and especially story telling, Harold Rosen and partner Betty both actively promoted this as part of classroom pedagogy. Their evidence mostly came through action research in the classroom rather than systematic enquiry. However, it is worth mentioning here one justifiably famous US text Ways with Words by Shirley Brice-Heath [1983]. This painstaking ethnographic participant study of three neighbouring communities, produced some fascinating insights into the language of communities and homes and to the very different ways in which people tell stories.
The second strand was a much clearer recognition that oral language development was ongoing and not something determined by home and two years in primary school. Gordon Wells pioneered research in this area and his ‘Language at home and at school’ project produced some of the first longitudinal evidence that studied language development at home and then at school. [see, for example, Wells, 1997]
The issue of Language and Gender has been a significant ‘discovery’ of the 20th Century and Feminism has exposed the gendered nature of all forms of discourse. In the classroom the tendency of boys to dominate talk and to demand more linguistic attention are now well known. As mentioned in the introduction I am not aiming to cover this area in any detail but there is certainly plenty of research evidence to consider.
A comfortable and perhaps complacent consensus?
It seems to me that a consensus has settled around S&L which may now be a limitation on development. Its importance remains accepted and it has the status of assessment in Key Stage 4. English teachers all use what they call ‘oral work’ and think about varying oral patterns, pair work, group work, whole class discussion, gender dynamics and so on --- but this is not very different to 20 years ago. And certainly Listening gets little explicit attention and probably deserves some very focused research so we can understand its role better in educational settings.
There are some areas of research in S&L that seem not have impacted much on practice. Linguists like David Crystal and Ron Carter [who directed the ill-fated LINC project] have been showing how different is the grammar of spoken English to the written and Carter has been developing a corpus of spoken language that has vast potential to help English teachers understand how the spoken language really ‘works’. Neil Mercer and colleagues have been examining the way talking develops reasoning in groups and individuals [Mercer, 2004] and there could be very strong implications for the kinds of activities that English teachers need to provide their pupils.
Andrews, R. (2001) Teaching and Learning English: A Guide to Recent Research and its applications, London, Continuum.
Barnes, D., Britton, J., Rosen, H. and LATE (1969) Language, the learner and the school, Penguin, London.
Brice-Heath, S. (1983) Ways with Words:Langauge, life and work in communities and classrooms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Britton, J. (1970) Language and Learning, Penguin; London.
Mercer, N., Dawes, R., Wegerif. R. and Sams, C. (2004) ‘Reasoning as a Scientist: ways of helping children to use language to learn Science’, British Educational Research Journal, 30, 3, 367-385
Wells, G. (1987) The Meaning makers: children learning language and using language to learn, Hodder and Stoughton, London
 
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