ABSTRACT
Here we continue the examination of dialogue ‘in other words’ by investigating what among teachers is perhaps the most familiar of all its contingent terms: oracy. In recent usage, as opposed to the way it was first conceived by Andrew Wilkinson and then applied in the National Oracy Project, the term has been somewhat diminished by branding that aligns it with the reductionist ‘skills’ movement. Elsewhere, it has been more appropriately coined in order to focus attention on the needs of children and students with language and communication difficulties and to guide therapeutic interventions. So this term, too, is problematic. There are also important questions about its relationship to literacy. Here we encounter the ‘grand dichotomy’ which too often positions the spoken and the written in an unequal or oppositional relationship, and within formal education relegates talk to a supporting role. The dichotomy is equally unsatisfactory linguistically, for even though there are clear and obvious differences between speech and writing, these are more validly viewed as overlapping registers. On that basis we argue for, but as yet find limited evidence of, pedagogies that succeed in setting the oral and the written in a genuinely reciprocal and dialectical relationship.
