ABSTRACT
This article begins by questioning some commonly held assumptions about the nature and value of ‘talk’ in school and goes on to propose a crucial difference between primarily ‘listener-oriented’ speech and primarily ‘message-oriented’ speech. Gill Brown discusses the forms and functions of these two types of talk and argues that ‘message-oriented’ speech is not explicitly taught in schools in spite of its importance to an individual in the performance of a wide range of tasks in a literate society. In the latter part of the article she discusses the kind of criteria which should inform the explicit teaching and principled assessment of message-oriented speech. Such syllabi will need to take into account a number of variables including the addressee, how much the addressee knows about what the speaker is talking about, how familiar the topic is to the speaker, how complex the topic is, and how much the structure of what the student/pupil has to talk about is provided by the nature of the task itself.
