Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 10 Oral language
[pages 141 - 161]

TALKING AND LISTENING

10.1 In his last term in the junior school a child may be with one teacher for the whole of the curriculum and for every session in the week. From his first week in the secondary school he may have different teachers for the ten or more subjects on the timetable, and may move to a different classroom every time the bell rings. In each situation he has to adapt to different styles of relationship, content, and methods of presentation. The implications of this change from one environment to another are considerable for the child and will affect his response as a talker and as a listener. The nature of the language encounter is shaped by the organisation of the pupil's learning experience. In many of his specialist subject lessons in the secondary school the experience is likely to give him much less scope for exploratory talk. There is a greater probability of direct teaching, with the teacher controlling the lesson by question and answer, and the pupils' responses shepherded within defined limits.

10.2 We need to begin by examining the nature of the language experience in the dialogue between teacher and class within this framework. By its very nature a lesson is a verbal encounter through which the teacher draws information from the class, elaborates and generalises it, and produces a synthesis. His skill is in selecting, prompting, improvising, and generally orchestrating the exchange. But in practice the course of any dialogue in which one person is managing 30 is only partly predictable. There will be false avenues and unexpected diversions. There will be minute by minute changes in the ratio of teacher-pupil contribution, depending upon how unfamiliar to the children the material becomes at any given point. In fact the class lesson is a very complex process. This complexity has always been intuitively recognised by teachers, but only comparatively recently has it been systematically studied. By an examination of tape transcripts Barnes (1) has illustrated the difficulties that face the pupil when a subject teacher is trying to 'implant concepts' by question and answer. It has also become clear what difficulties face the teacher if he is to encourage genuine exploration and learning on the part of his pupils, and not simply the game of guessing what he has in mind. What the teacher has in mind may well be the desirable destination of a thinking process; but a learner needs to trace the steps from the familiar to the new, from the fact or idea he possesses to that which he is to acquire. In other words, the learner has to make a journey in thought for himself. The kind of class lesson we are describing has therefore to be supported by others in which the pupils' own exploratory talk has much more scope. Where it builds upon such talk the class lesson can be an important way of encouraging the final steps by which a new piece of learning is securely reached. But it can achieve this only if the teacher-directed discussion takes up and uses the contributions of the pupils, for these indicate the stages at which pupils' thinking now stands, and they point the steps by which the destination can be reached. 'Guessing what the teacher has in mind' becomes only too easily a substitute for this more arduous process.

10.3 One way for the teacher to avoid this is to watch that the questions he asks are open-ended rather than closed, and that the synthesis he brings about is seen to be the end point of the pupils' own thinking under his guidance. Genuine thinking may be more readily provoked when the teacher poses a genuine problem than when he asks a question to which he knows the answer. In a recent project Sinclair (2) has analysed the discourse of lessons to show how varieties of teacher utterance are related to varieties of pupil utterance, and vice versa. He shows, for example, that what may appear at first sight to be an alternation of two kinds of discourse, the question from the teacher and the answer from a pupil, is in fact very often an exchange containing three kinds of discourse: question (teacher), answer (pupil) and evaluation (teacher). 'Evaluation', in plainer terms, is the teacher's verdict on the pupil's answer. It may appear a rather elusive feature to anyone reading a transcript of a lesson, because it is often carried by the tone of voice rather than delivered in so many words, but it influences the discourse in such a way that the 'class discussion' is often no more than a series of disconnected endeavours to read the teacher's mind.

10.4 There is research evidence to suggest that on average the teacher talks for three quarters of the time in the usual teacher-class situation. It has been calculated from this that in a 45 minute period the amount of time left for a class of 30 to contribute is an average of some 20 seconds per pupil. Of course this does not happen in practice. Pupils have their own 'hidden agendas', and some will avoid any participation, given the chance this kind of situation affords. The rest may compete for attention, and the teacher determines not only who shall speak but what value their contribution is accorded. The exact nature of this control will depend upon the sensitivity and skill of the teacher, his view of the subject matter, and the pupils' understanding of what is expected of them. Teachers of young children, for instance, are more likely to be tolerant of anecdote than are those of older pupils. They recognise that an offering of wavering relevance may be essential to the child's way in to the dialogue. In the secondary school the subject teacher is usually concerned to achieve a step by step presentation of his material, and this often results in his asking the kinds of questions that elicit one-word answers. Some recent research in a number of American junior high schools showed that on average the teacher asked a new question every 12 seconds. It would be unwise to infer that the same rate would be found in this country. Nevertheless, it indicates that speed of questions, and therefore brevity of answers, is a likely feature where the dialogue is being used simply to transmit information. It is obvious that at this rate of exchange there can be little opportunity for genuine thinking. The teacher's effectiveness will be increased if he has an explicit awareness of the nature and characteristics of the discourse. If he denies himself the feedback from his pupils' reformulations of the stages in an argument, he cannot assess how successful he has been.

10.5 Before considering other forms of classroom dialogue it would be useful to pause on the question of the teacher's explicit understanding of his pupils' language. The point to be emphasised is that the child's language should be accepted, and most teachers appreciate the importance of this. To criticise a person's speech may be an attack on his self-esteem, and the extent to which the two are associated is evident from the status accorded to accent in society at large. There is a marked social element in the 'aesthetic' assessment of accents, in which researchers have found a hierarchy. At the top is Received Pronunciation, followed by certain foreign and regional accents, with industrial and 'town' accents in the lower reaches. In one survey Birmingham was placed firmly at the bottom, with Cockney only a little way above it. Research conducted in New York by Labov (3) found that the 'upwardly socially mobile' had a particularly sensitive perception of sounds in listening to spoken language. They were highly sensitive to the model to which they were aspiring and consequently to those sounds which they felt they should avoid. We believe that a child's accent should be accepted, and that to attempt to suppress it is irrational and neither humane nor necessary. The teacher's aim should be to indicate to his pupils the value of awareness and flexibility, so that they can make their own decisions and modify these as their views alter.

10.6 The question of conformity to acceptable standards of grammar and diction is rather more difficult and certainly one in which more teachers feel the need to change the speech habits of their pupils. However, a view that has long been held by linguists is that an utterance may be 'correct' in one linguistic situation but not in another. Any one person belongs to a number of speech communities, and correctness therefore becomes a matter of conforming to the linguistic behaviour appropriate to the situation in which he is talking. Many people find this notion of relativity hard to accept, but it seems to us far more reasonable to think in terms of appropriateness than of absolute correctness. This is to operate positively rather than negatively, in the sense that one is seeking to extend the child's range of language use, not restrict it. The aim is not to alienate the child from a form of language with which he has grown up and which serves him efficiently in the speech community of his neighbourhood. It is to enlarge his repertoire so that he can use language effectively in other speech situations and use standard forms when they are needed. This clearly cannot be achieved overnight, which is why we emphasise that the teacher should start where the child is and should accept the language he brings to school. In the course of the child's life in school there should be a gradual and growing extension of his powers of language to meet new demands and new situations, and this again takes us firmly to the need for an explicit knowledge by the teacher of how language operates.

10.7 There are other reasons why inappropriate evaluations are sometimes applied to the spoken word. Putting it very generally, not enough account is taken of the fundamental differences that exist between speech and writing. The writer must usually entrust his message to the words on the page. A spoken utterance, on the other hand, is not generally required to carry the full and final expression of a speaker's meaning, since he is in touch with his listeners and in the light of their responses can repeat, modify, or add to what he has said. Furthermore, a speaker uses more than words. He uses paralinguistic features, which supplement the words themselves and govern the way in which a thing is said. Intonation patterns and other paralinguistic features carry a great deal of the meaning. Tone of voice, pitch, intensity, timing, facial expression and physical gestures: all may contribute as part of his message. His pauses may range from mere hesitations to long silences, his gestures from the deliberate and formal to the unconscious expressiveness of bodily posture.

10.8 Written language has to take on a precision and complexity of linguistic structure that is not demanded of speech. If a reader wishes he can shut himself away with the text, giving it his whole attention. The words stand before him on the page, and he may vary his speed to match his comprehension, going back to re-read where he needs to, or pausing to make sure of a meaning before he reads on, cross-referencing for himself backwards and forwards in the text. A listener to speech, on the other hand, must catch his message on the wing. Thus it is that repetitions, re-phrasings, annotations, and extensions en route, all of them varieties of 'redundancy', are not only permissible in a way they would not be in writing, but may well indeed be essential. It is a tendency of the written language to transcend differences in time and place, and hence to offer some resistance to change. It is in the nature of the spoken language to change in response to changing demands, and for a variety of reasons. With such general differences as these in mind, one linguist (4) has gone as far as to claim that 'serious written English may be regarded as a rather artificial dialect of our language'.

10.9 In spoken language the paralinguistic features we have been describing strongly influence one person's judgement of another's effectiveness. This fact is tacitly recognised by most people, who know they can be charmed by nonsense and bored by sense. What they are largely unaware of is exactly how this is happening. Some teachers acquire a high degree of skill in assessing the spoken language of their pupils, but there is evidence (5) that very many find it difficult. We believe that an explicit understanding of the nature of spoken language would extend their ability to influence it. The teacher's own speech is a crucial factor in developing that of his pupils; even more important are the understanding and the informed attitudes he brings to the whole undertaking.

10.10 What then of ways in which verbal interaction can be organised to extend the pupils' ability to handle language? Throughout the primary and middle years the change of emphasis from teaching to learning has meant that talk now occupies a position of central importance. This is not, of course, to suggest that the classroom of the past operated simply on the principle that the teacher talked and the pupils listened, and that their output was through the medium of the pen. Nevertheless, new patterns of classroom organisation have changed the balance, so that primary school children spend more time discovering for themselves and talking about their discoveries. The teacher's role in this is vitally important and very demanding; for it is not enough to assume that, given a wide range of activities in a lively primary classroom, the child's language can be left to take care of itself. There is obviously great value in providing opportunities for children simply to talk freely and informally on whatever interests them, and nothing we say should be taken as detracting from this. But although such talk may serve many useful purposes it will not necessarily develop the children's ability to use language as an instrument for learning. The important question to ask is whether demands are being made upon their language by the nature of the problem and the process of arriving at a solution to it. Children need to represent to themselves and others what is being learnt, and a study of tape transcripts will show that in any group learning activity this is not an automatic outcome. It is even less likely to happen where children work individually through assignment cards or work sheets. As one among a variety of learning devices these have their place, but where they are used widely on an individual basis this limitation should be recognised.

10.11 The teacher's role should be one of planned intervention, and his purposes and the means of fulfilling them must be clear in his mind. Important among these purposes should be the intention to increase the complexity of the child's thinking, so that he does not rest on the mere expression of opinion but uses language in an exploratory way. The child should be encouraged to ask good questions as well as provide answers, to set up hypotheses and test them, and to develop the habit of trying out alternative explanations instead of being satisfied with one. This is unlikely to be managed easily in the full class situation, where the teacher has an obvious problem. If he allows the articulate to dominate he is doing nothing for the less articulate. If he tries to draw the latter into public participation they will often fail and their confidence will suffer further. Small group work, on the other hand, provides the security which encourages the less articulate to claim a greater share of the exchange. It is important that the teacher should spend time with each of the small groups to guide the language into fulfilling its purpose. 'Guidance' is not used here in the sense of dominant intervention; indeed receptive silence is as much a part of it as the most persuasive utterance. The teacher has first to be a good listener, letting his genuine interest act as a stimulus. His questions will encourage the pupils to develop or clarify points in their thinking, or take them beyond it into the contemplation of other possibilities. We must not give the impression, however, that this is a simple matter and that there are no problems. The work of Sinclair and his colleagues has suggested that the reason children are not encouraged to ask questions is that so often they are placed in a non-initiating role. Moreover, as we have already pointed out, they are inevitably aware that there is something artificial about an exchange where the teacher's part is to evaluate their contribution and where he knows in advance what they are likely to say. These inhibiting factors cannot simply be wished away. The teacher must devise situations in which the pupils will naturally adopt the kind of behaviour he wants to encourage. In other words, he must structure the learning so that the child becomes positively aware of the need for a complicated utterance, and is impelled to make it. In this way the teacher's skilled and carefully controlled intervention is a valuable means of extending his pupils' thinking and making new demands upon their language. We have suggested that in primary schools the organisation of the work often makes it relatively easy for the teacher to arrange this kind of participation and that in the secondary school the picture is more complicated. Many English and humanities teachers plan such opportunities, but there are lessons in other subjects where no such flexibility is at work. We urge in a subsequent chapter that the role of language throughout the curriculum should be an important consideration in secondary schools. The child's need to organise knowledge through language should be recognised in all subjects.

10.12 When children bring language to bear on a problem within a small group their talk is often tentative, discursive, inexplicit, and uncertain of direction; the natural outcome of an encounter with unfamiliar ideas and material. The intimacy of the context allows all this to happen without any sense of strain. In an atmosphere of tolerance, of hesitant formulation, and of cooperative effort the children can 'stretch' their language to accommodate their own second thoughts and the opinions of others. They can 'float' their notions without fear of having them dismissed. Larger and more formal contexts make different demands, and the child should learn to be able to cope with these. The exploratory dialogue of the small group will obviously not serve when the pupil is presenting ideas to the whole class. For one thing the situation affords less security, since what could be chanced with the other members of a group of six will be less acceptable to a class of thirty. Tentativeness has to be replaced by an explicit sense of direction, and the pupil has to organise his thought for the benefit of a variety of listeners, whose attention he must try to hold. He has to think beyond his immediate words and be prepared to elaborate, since the larger group may seek further information where the small group would be content with what is immediately available. The two activities should be related, the one arising from the other in a purposeful way. Some small group work should have as its end a sharing of its conclusions with the whole class. This will impose upon it the need for shaping and organisation, and decisions as to how the material can be most effectively presented. Presentation can take many forms; it may be written, visual, or dramatic, or it may be through 'planned dialogue', with members of the group publicly exchanging views and afterwards summarising their conclusions. Some pupils may wish to make up a tape recording, supporting it with a film-strip they have made themselves. Easy-loading cameras and battery-operated portable tape recorders should be readily available for this purpose. If children want to incorporate into their main tape the interviews and sounds they have recorded outside the school they should have tape copying facilities. In short the whole programme should have proper resources. The children must be able to feel that their efforts have had a real purpose and have been taken seriously. A good deal of the oral work we saw in schools suffered from a lack of contact with reality in the sense that it did not carry this conviction of real purpose. Its air of contrivance was apparent to the children themselves, and since their language was answering to no real need beyond that of an elaborate exercise it had an artificial restraint about it. This was particularly true of the weekly period devoted on lecturettes, 'formal' debates, and mock interviews.

10.13 There is a place for all these activities at some time or another, and the short talk has a particular claim. But all too often they have no relationship to the rest of the work and they lack context and support. Moreover, some of them are so organised that the majority of the class are passive listeners throughout the period. An example is a lesson we saw where a class of thirteen year olds was having mock interviews for a job. The teacher sat at his desk representing the employer, the pupil facing him with her back to the class. Only half the resulting dialogue could be heard, and the rest of the class had no opportunity for participation of any kind. The following diagram represents the pattern of voluntary participation observed in another lesson, where the teacher was attempting to involve as many pupils as possible in a class discussion:

It is at least possible that diagrams from a larger sample of English lessons devoted to 'discussion' would produce a similar pattern. In another school each child in a class of eleven year olds was giving a lecturette on a subject chosen by himself. The time for preparation was minimal and many of the children faltered to a halt without filling their allotted span. The feeling of contrivance was increased by the fact that each child had afterwards to submit to a public criticism and was allotted a grade by class vote.

10.14 The most successful example of this activity we encountered was where the children in a 'remedial' group were presenting what amounted to a series of demonstrations with commentary. They had about them all the raw materials of their interests and talked fluently as they handled them. One boy had constructed a model horse which he fitted with bridle, saddle etc in the process of his talk. All this was the outcome of the skill and enthusiasm of the teacher and was a natural element of the flow of work rather than a staged event. It is important to note that the children were being themselves, not obliged to play roles, or to see the situation as different from what it was in reality, or to imagine anything that was not the case. There is often great excitement and high motivation in simulation, role-playing, and constructing imaginary situations, but activities based on actualities ought not to be neglected. For some children, including the less confident and less gifted, such work can provide a firm base from which to undertake expeditions into imagined worlds. In one school we saw a class absorbed in a project which involved all the activities to be found in the formal 'speech lesson', but provided them with a context that gave them meaning. The children were asked to study the problem of the siting of a new airport and produce their solutions. The teacher had planned it meticulously, producing photographs, documents, and large-scale maps. Within their groups the pupils played the roles of interested parties and prepared for these roles by tape recording conversations with a number of local people, e.g. museum curator, planning officer, and shopkeepers, and by writing personal profiles. All the group activity culminated in a sharing of the work, in which some pupils gave talks, some were interviewed, and others presented round table discussions. Throughout the project they had been given the opportunity to test hypotheses and solve problems and at the same time to project themselves into the feelings of others.

10.15 This capacity for projection, this readiness to speculate upon experience beyond one's own, is one of the great values of literature, and of talking about literature. Through talk about personal experience, and its objectification in books and stories, the child is able not merely to reshape his own but to accommodate that of others. An important task for the teacher is to encourage a view of discussion as a means of enlarging one's own personal world and modifying it to take account of other people's. So much formal discussion at adult level goes no further than the exchange of prejudices, or at the very least of inflexible points of view. Children should learn while at school that discussion is an opportunity to explore and illuminate a subject, not drive home relentlessly one's own personal opinions.

10.16 Some teachers have adopted the kind of approach recommended by the Schools Council Humanities Curriculum Project (6) in setting up discussions on controversial issues. This project was instituted in 1967 and in an evaluation of its effects it was found that statistically significant improvements were recorded on the Manchester Reading Test and the Mill Hill Vocabulary Test. The aim of the project has been to offer to secondary schools and to teachers 'such stimulus, support and materials as may be appropriate to ... enquiry-based courses which cross the traditional boundaries between English, history, geography, religious studies and social studies'. Eight themes were illustrated by a great variety of materials - extracts from novels, history, drama, letters, reports, maps, advertisements, film, tape, slides, and other forms of 'evidence':

These were intended to lead to a wide range of practical and creative activities, the planning of which produced the opportunities for a great deal of purposeful talk. At the heart of the project was the small group discussion through which the pupils considered the evidence in the packs of materials. In the course of this the teacher was to submit to 'the criterion of neutrality'. He would take no sides in the controversy but would encourage 'rationality rather than irrationality, sensitivity rather than insensitivity, imaginativeness rather than unimaginativeness, tolerance rather than intolerance'. These are admirable objectives, and in our visits and our discussions we studied the extent to which they were being realised. We noted that some secondary schools have adopted an approach of this kind to the extent of cutting into the allocation of time for English to make way for it. This is a reasonable practice so long as (a) the pupils' experience is in no respect diminished from that which they would encounter in a normal range of English lessons; (b) the pupils are with teachers of English who understand their language needs and can ensure that the materials and activities are meeting them. We came across situations where these conditions were not being fulfilled and where the language work was lacking in direction. One reason for this was that the teacher sometimes lacked the skill to ensure that the quantity of documentary evidence did not outweigh the quality of expression. Even where this skill was present the evidence seemed sometimes to limit the value of the discussion rather than promote it.

10.17 We believe that those English teachers who have critically examined the relationship between materials and discourse have raised important questions. We also believe that the place of literature in such materials needs careful consideration. Some children are in danger of encountering literature only in the context of social controversy, and only then in the form of extract, short story, or poem. In the nature of things these tend to be chosen for their application to the theme rather than primarily for their quality or their relevance to the child's wider interests and needs. This is a shortcoming of much thematic work on social issues, some of which lacks the advantage of the detailed planning and collection of resources that went into the Schools Council Humanities Curriculum Project. We would be the last to deny the value of relating literature to live issues of human concern; indeed, elsewhere in the Report we urge that very relationship. But it is not the function of literature to provide a kind of social comprehension test; nor to serve as a glib and instant illustration, its true significances left unexplored.

10.18 The Humanities Curriculum Project has done a great deal to draw attention to the ways in which discussion can be inhibited by the 'hidden agenda' of the teacher, made manifest by implicit marks of approval or disapproval, and by questions which lead to passive acquiescence rather than deeper enquiry. Its best exponents deny that the procedural neutrality of the chairman implies abdication of responsibility. Yet fears have been expressed that in less competent hands the role might be interpreted in just this way, and be damagingly negative. The teacher-chairman's role is too complex to be circumscribed by simple notions of impartiality, and the Project, when properly understood, gives clear pointers to that complexity. We have expressed some reservations about the Project as it relates to the teaching of English, but we are in no doubt about its strengths. It is providing a helpful contribution to the growth of understanding about the nature of talk in the classroom, and of the teacher's vital part in developing in his pupils the attributes we have been advocating.

10.19 We move now to the question of listening. One or two witnesses gave it as their opinion that children are poorer listeners now than in the past. It was suggested that there has been a marked deterioration in children's ability to listen to instructions, to the teacher reading, and to radio broadcasts. We question whether there is evidence to support this contention. Opinions on such an issue are bound to be subjective, and only by the application of monitoring procedures could there be any certainty. Experiment has shown that students listening to lectures comprehend only about half the substance of them. The difficulty of listening is commonly underestimated, and it is another aspect of communication that deserves to be better understood. Human attention is limited, and the longer people are required to listen the less effectively they do it. Research findings on the amount of time pupils spend listening may now be out of date, but they have indicated that of the time devoted to listening, speaking, reading and writing, well over half is taken up by the first. Since much of this is purely passive its efficiency is limited. People listen best when they have to take some action upon the information they have received. Where they have the opportunity to reply or to participate through action their attention is stimulated.

10.20 To conclude that most listening is inefficient is to prompt the question: what can be done to improve it? A good deal of attention has been given to this question in the USA, where experiments (7) have been conducted to isolate listening skills and evaluate techniques to improve them. The question is whether training can bring about a discernible improvement. To be persuaded of its value we would need evidence that it succeeds not only in the immediate situation but in the long-term, and that the improvement becomes general and transferable. The American experiments give no assurance of this, and even their short-term gains are open to question. An obvious difficulty of evaluation is that the testing situation itself is likely to influence the individual to try to perform better than he ordinarily does. For instance, it was found in the USA that the 'actual listening behaviour' of a group of adults bore little relation to their test scores. Moreover, many of the listening tests and training programmes are based on the reading aloud of written language, which is certainly not representative of the listening skill the individual needs for the varied activities in which he is daily involved.

10.21 We cannot support the kind of 'listening exercise' which is applied to a whole class, irrespective of individual capacity and need. This device is to be found in some commercially produced kits, where the teacher reads out a passage and the children afterwards answer questions on a work-card. Wherever we saw this being practised it involved the whole of a mixed ability class, and in our view the exercise had little to recommend it. The able children could have been given more demanding listening experience, and the slow learners suffered from having their inadequacies made public. The essential question is whether listening skills can and should be dealt with in isolation. In our view listening ability cannot be regarded as something to be abstracted, remedied, and returned. It is part of a highly complex process in which it is related to the individual situation and to the knowledge and experience of the listener, the nature of his motivation, and the degree of his involvement. We have argued that the teacher should engineer situations designed to extend his pupils' ability to use language for a particular purpose. In the same way he should aim to extend their receptive capacity. To a large extent the two will obviously be interdependent, for when children are working together to an end, listening becomes essential to their success. But we again emphasise that a conscious policy on the part of the teacher is necessary. There may be no evidence to show that formal training procedures are lastingly effective, but there is an equal lack of evidence to suggest that the daily activity of the classroom is in itself sufficient. In our view the ability can best be developed as part of the normal work of the classroom and in association with other learning experiences. But deliberate strategies may be required, for it cannot be assumed that the improvement will take place automatically.

10.22 This has implications for equipment and resources, and we believe that the teacher should have ready access to anthologies of spoken language on tape. These anthologies should consist of language in use in a wide variety of real life situations, or as accurate a simulation of them as can be obtained. Groups of teachers have already shown what can be achieved in the preparation of tapes and transcripts. This kind of activity could be directed to the production of collections of spoken language, supplemented by recorded broadcast material not subject to copyright. In the early stages of development these might go into a centrally held bank maintained at the teachers' centre or by the local authority's audio-visual service. Where possible, however, they should be copied for each school which requests them. Some schools will prefer to build up their own collections. A secondary school and its contributory primary schools might cooperate to produce material that will ensure continuity across the point of transfer.

10.23 Work of the kind we have been describing must be supported by resources on a proper scale. Our survey (see Tables 36 and 37) revealed that many schools do not even have the use of a mains tape recorder for the teaching of English. Small primary schools suffer particularly in this respect. 93 per cent of schools of over 350 pupils used a mains tape recorder, but the figure was as low as 66 per cent in the case of schools of up to 70 pupils. The disparity was even greater in respect of battery-operated portable tape recorders, which we regard as a valuable aid in the development of oral language. The corresponding figures here were 58 per cent and 17 per cent respectively. A child has an equal right to such facilities whatever the size of school he attends. Indeed, it is surprising that there remain so many schools where English teaching lacks these essential pieces of equipment. The survey revealed that one in five of the sample primary schools had no mains tape recorder, while three in five had no battery-operated model. In our view the tape recorder is an indispensable instrument for oral work, and no teacher should be without ready access to one. In our survey of secondary schools we asked whether certain items of equipment were available for the teaching of English. The question was phrased in this way to take account of those schools where the equipment is held centrally and borrowed by departments when required. 98 per cent of schools had a mains tape recorder and 57 per cent a battery-operated portable. The first figure is highly encouraging, though it may mask many instances of difficulty for teachers. To be of greatest value a tape recorder should be ready for use at very short notice. It should certainly not be necessary to have to 'book' it for a particular lesson or send for it over some distance.

10.24 Continuity and development are difficult enough to ensure in children's writing, where the product can be re-examined and compared with earlier performance. They are still more difficult to identify in children's talking and listening, even with the help of a tape recorder to provide the aural equivalent of re-reading. We believe, however, that the notion of continuity and progress is an important one, and that it should be defined as clearly as possible within the teacher's mind. The following are suggested as guidelines to the kind of progression a teacher might hope to develop. They are not intended to be exhaustive, nor to apply to any given age-points, still less to provide finishing lines which every child must be expected to cross:

(i) from simple anecdote, strung together mainly by coordinate syntax, to a shaped narrative, aided by voice qualities, timing, and emphasis;

(ii) from limited to extended span; not only in the length of utterance, but in the ability to range backwards and forwards over the discussion, with an awareness of the relationship between its parts as it develops. When a pupil can say, at the appropriate point, 'Ah, but you said just now that ...', or 'I want to pick up what X said ...', he is demonstrating this very important quality;

(iii) from simple reiteration by the speaker of his own point of view to an openness to the complexity of the dialogue, so that he is able to modify his own viewpoint to accommodate the contributions of others, and encourage and interpret other opinions as part of a cooperative activity;

(iv) from the concrete to the abstract, the subjective to the objective, the present to the past and future.

10.25 It has been the practice for a considerable time for some schools to enter pupils for examinations in spoken English. This facility has been offered by the English Speaking Board and by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music for the past twenty years, and also by the Poetry Society. Our survey showed that 6 per cent of the secondary schools in the sample were represented in membership of the English Speaking Board. During the last ten years all the CSE regional boards have introduced examinations in oral English, and it is also featured in trial English syllabuses for a single examination at 16+. In 1964 an experiment (8) was conducted by the Southern Regional Examinations Board in association with the University of Southampton to study the examining on a large scale of oral English. 450 candidates were divided into four groups, each of which took a different form of oral examination:

1. reading a passage and talking with the examiner.
2. making a short speech or lecture and answering questions.
3. talking to the examiner about a diagram previously studied.
4. participation in group discussion.

10.26 There was obvious interest in the possibilities of such examining, for CSE boards have made oral English a compulsory element of their English examination. Some emphasise in their regulations that the examination is not intended as a test of elocution, and candidates are reassured that regional speech will not be penalised as long as it is clearly understandable. In the syllabuses the most commonly represented components are the prepared talk, conversation, and reading aloud. Certain of the boards include in the course work element such optional activities as improvised and scripted drama, debates, tape recorded interviews, and aural comprehension. There are marked contrasts between some of the syllabuses. For example, the Associated Lancashire Schools Examining Board has a fixed requirement for a prepared talk and reading aloud, plus a straight option between group discussion and a duologue on a given topic. The neighbouring North Western Secondary Schools Examining Board, on the other hand, has no compulsory elements and rests on options from among nine widely ranging activities. It leaves the choice of speech situations to the school, with the provision that candidates should show ability to '(a) transmit ideas and feelings, (b) describe what has been experienced, (c) narrate, (d) present and discuss a point of view'. The Middlesex Regional Board's examination consists simply of a group discussion among five or six candidates with an external examiner. The Yorkshire Regional Board requires only that 'the test should cover such oral work as might take place during classwork and must include a conversation with the teacher on a topic provided by the candidate'. The only GCE O Level examination in Spoken English at present available is that of the London Board, which gives as its aim 'to test articulation and fluency'. Its requirements are reading aloud and group and individual conversations with the examiner.

10.27 If CSE Mode 3 syllabuses and the work of the English Speaking Board are added to the above the total represents a considerable volume of testing of spoken English. By no means all teachers are convinced that this is a good thing. We have talked to a number who believe that the concept itself is a questionable one and that all too often artificiality perverts such value as can be admitted. Such comments as the following sum up the misgivings that these teachers feel: 'One of my most curious activities each year is helping to conduct a test in conversational English under the directions of my CSE Examination Board. In this the candidate comes into my room to conduct a conversation with me and another "examiner"; thereafter it is our task to solemnly award him a mark out of ten. Nothing less like a genuine conversational situation could be imagined .... Talk as a medium of social intercourse cannot be reduced to the level of an examination mark' (9). There is, of course, a fundamental dilemma. The examination should assess the pupil's capacity in a natural and unforced way, and when an external examiner is present this is difficult to achieve. Moreover, the very prospect of his presence is likely to lead to rehearsal - even training - for the event, and this increases the artificiality. It is fair to point out that some of the examining boards have gone out of their way to eliminate this. They explain at length, either in the syllabus or in separate leaflets, the need to create an environment in which natural exchange of speech is possible. Some have allowed a good deal of freedom in the choice of activity, and have placed the emphasis on continuous assessment with external moderation. These are conditions also enjoyed by teachers who have devised their own Mode 3 syllabuses. These circumstances give rise in turn to the question: what then is the justification for examining spoken English? There might be an argument for the more formal, externally marked examination. Of course it is 'unnatural', but the capacity to talk fluently and confidently in such a situation might itself be an achievement it was felt desirable to record. On the other hand, the further one goes to reduce the examination character of the activity, the more obvious becomes the question: why examine at all? Teachers to whom this question is posed say that the examination acts as an incentive to their pupils. However natural and incidental the continuous assessment, the pupil knows that it adds up to an examination result, and he therefore becomes conscious of the need to improve his speech habits.

10.28 As far as we are concerned there is one dominating criterion. Is an examination syllabus likely to further the objectives which we have outlined in this chapter? Is it likely to promote talk as an instrument for learning and for thinking? Will it help to extend a pupil's command over the varied resources of spoken language? Will it help him to look upon discussion as an activity in which it is as important to interpret and accommodate the view of others as to express his own? Will it develop in him the capacity to move from the concrete to the abstract, the immediate to the distant and the hypothetical? Expressed in this way these are unfair questions, for these attributes, and others we have suggested, are the equal concern of contexts outside the English lesson. They are, in fact, an important objective of the child's total education. The questions have nevertheless to be asked, for an examination which has a specialised concern with speech as such has admitted to itself a particular responsibility. In so far as the examining of spoken English can help to develop these qualities we support it. Where it does not we question its value. In our view it is sound practice for a school to set itself such objectives and then assess the extent to which it is fulfilling them. If it does this by public examination it is more likely to succeed with a Mode 3 syllabus it has devised for itself in such a way that the examination reflects the work and does not distort it. Failing this it will be served best by a Mode 1 syllabus which is sufficiently flexible to allow this essential condition to operate. We believe it is reasonable that certain accomplishments should be expected of a mature sixteen year old. Indeed, implicit in what we have advocated as a set of objectives is the ability, for example, to speak to a theme, to develop an argument, to present a case. What we question is the assumption that formal training will produce it, that 'speaking speech' as an end in itself is the best means of achieving such a purpose. We believe that all language activities should take place in a context where they have real, not contrived meaning. An examination syllabus states a requirement; it does not say how a pupil should be prepared to meet it. Nevertheless, we know from our visits that in many schools the preparation takes the form of set-piece exercises. A great deal of thoughtful work has gone into the preparation of CSE syllabuses, and the boards are to be commended for the lead they have given. Some of them have produced particularly imaginative syllabuses which encourage schools to be equally imaginative in response to them. There remains, however, room for research into the manner in which syllabus and classroom practice interact. Comparative studies and other projects should seek to identify the kind of examination which will encourage the development of oral ability in the manner we have described in this section.

10.29 One valuable service performed by all the teachers involved in devising and administering oral examinations has been to generate interest in spoken language. There has been intensive study and discussion involving many hundreds of teachers, and attention has been focused on spoken English with more organised purpose than ever before. Throughout this part of the Report we emphasise the importance of the teacher in the development of children's spoken language. Only if he is well informed about the processes at work will he be able to appraise it and make decisions accordingly on how to extend an individual's repertoire. In Chapter 17 we recommend procedures involving close observation, and we believe that these should continue throughout the middle years. As children grow older the school makes progressively greater demands on their language. The teacher should have an explicit knowledge of the nature of these demands to enable him to help the child who is finding it difficult to meet them. We particularly appreciate the professional concern of those teachers who have had tape recordings and transcripts produced of their own and their pupils' spoken language activities. These have provided admirable material for study, and we hope that more teachers will take advantage of this means of studying language in action. Such records provide a stimulating basis for discussion by groups of teachers in in-service and development work. We believe the teacher has an important role to play in research in this field, and the following are some examples of the topics of study that need to receive attention:

(i) the effects of school and classroom organisation on the pupils' language behaviour;

(ii) the formulation into a coherent body of advice of the intuitions of teachers who are skilful at conducting discussions. This is a subtle role, and one that should receive more detailed study to identify its characteristics. Teachers who fulfil it successfully generally have a well-developed body of intuitions. They are good chairmen, not in the sense that they can control an agenda expeditiously, but in the less explicit sense that they can bring the best out of the participants, raising the level of performance of each;

(iii) the comparative achievements of small groups of pupils talking together (a) to a brief given by the teacher (b) without guidance; the most productive relationship between small-group and large-group work;

(iv) the relationship of children's oral language ability to their reading and writing;

(v) the effect of work in small groups of mixed ability on the language development of the less able.

DRAMA

10.31 Drama has an obvious and substantial contribution to make to the development of children's language, and its possibilities in this respect have yet to be fully explored. Before considering these we should make clear what we mean by the term 'drama' in the school context. Essentially, drama is a fundamental human activity which may include such elements as play, ritual, simulations and role-playing, to give but a few examples. Where the spectators' role becomes dominant in all these activities they can be said to turn into theatre or conscious art form. Where spectators are absent, or where they become so involved that they cease to be spectators, what results is also a powerful form of drama. In the context of education this is sometimes called 'educational', 'creative' or 'free' drama. It is inescapably social, for it is about working in a group, often to solve a problem or make a decision. As a word on the school timetable, then, 'drama' can imply either 'educational' drama or theatre, and these two main forms of activity themselves are extremely varied and fragmented.

10.32 Theatre implies performance to an audience and, generally speaking, performance based on a script or on the written word in some form; If we include activities in school clubs and societies it is still the most widespread form of 'dramatic' work in schools. Educational drama covers an extremely wide range of activities, verbal and non-verbal, whose common feature is that they depend very largely on improvisation of various sorts and do not, therefore, depend on the written word. Nor do they consider an audience to be of serious importance. Such activities may turn into the written word, i.e. become scripted, but generally speaking this does not happen unless a performance is envisaged. They may also arise out of the written word. There is still some tendency in schools for these two kinds of practice to be in sharp opposition to one another, even though in a varied and well-planned class drama lesson there will frequently be elements of the first of them. Quite often these two main activities do not exist under the same roof in the same school, or in the philosophy of the one drama teacher. Some teachers will have nothing to do with the scripted play; others take the view that improvisation is a waste of time. Fortunately, this polarisation of view, stemming from earlier training, is less prevalent now than in the past.

10.33 Neither extreme represents an adequate view of drama in schools. The ideal situation is one where the two forms of activity are complementary, so that the written word may become the spoken word and the spoken word the written. Improvisation can provide a physical context for the printed word to come to life. In Act I, Scene 2 of Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare's words appear on the page thus:

On the page these words are unfulfilled, almost meaningless, until the whole relationship and all its implications have been fully experienced by trying them out in a convincing setting - physical, social and emotional. It is this 'situational context', as a linguist would term it, that calls for improvisation. There are countless occasions when written words - not just those in a play - are illuminated by being placed in a real context, which drama can help to realise. In its turn improvisation can be enriched by the written word. This does not mean that the written word should be imposed upon the activity. It means that it can provide the origin and stimulus, the 'story', the 'situational contexts' for the work in improvisation. In other words, improvisation can be initiated or given substance by literature, for here may be found the characters, relationships and situations for imaginative work in improvised drama. What is so often lacking in improvisation is stimulus and subject matter of quality, and literature is an unequalled source of this. We have seen many improvised scenes in which the spontaneous language produced by the children was of limited range and interest, often rapidly degenerating into a trivial slanging match. Unless the stimulus of good writing (whether prose, verse, or drama) is offered from time to time the improvised dialogue will too often derive weakly from playground scraps and casual chats. The extending value of improvisation will then be lost. Nevertheless, quite apart from its other qualities, it is improvisation, involving the complicated relationships between the written and the spoken word, which seems to us to have particular value for language development.

10.34 At this point it would be as well to emphasise that there are many other sides to drama at least as valuable as the language aspect we are discussing. We do not wish to imply that such activities as movement, dance, mime, and the work which drama prompts in related arts are less important than the more identifiable language activities. At the same time, we do emphasise that teachers should not retreat from language in their improvisation work for negative reasons; for example, because of the difficulties some pupils apparently experience with words.

10.35 There appears to be an important distinction between children's language in improvised drama and that of most of their written work. The one is open-ended, volatile, and incremental in structure and idiom; the other is relatively closed and formalistic. All writing, even when at its most creative, tends in school work to be a patterning of words within which thoughts and feelings have to be contained and ordered. In drama an element of invention lies round every corner, and dialogue has a way of surprising itself so that nothing is predictable. This inventiveness is often revealed by children improvising on a simple domestic theme, such as shopping or planning a holiday, with no more space than a few square yards of classroom floor cleared of the furniture. The group of six year olds who pile up their rostra, fruit boxes and tables to make their castles or moon rockets are exercising imagination and intellect, physical coordination and social sense. And all the time they are using language as their means of bringing it to life. It is worth a thought that the higher up the school one goes the less likelihood is there of such open 'play' happening again, unless it is in the drama lesson. The following figures from our sample show that in the three years from six to nine the opportunities for this have decreased even there:

10.36 An important aspect of the creativity of speech as distinct from writing is the inexhaustible fund of grammatical forms and idioms available to children from a very early age. If, as Chomsky (10) argues, 'the normal use of language is innovative', it becomes a vital principle that the teacher should create opportunities most likely to produce innovation and generate 'natural' language in all its forms. An increasing number of teachers of drama, though they may not be prompted by Chomsky's linguistic theories, do in fact see their work as productive of such language. They would add that it helps to establish confidence in social intercourse, as well as familiarity with a variety of speech forms. They devise what might be described as a concentric series of situations. These vary from the known and the readily observed, such as family situations, to a wide range of less familiar situations, in which the pupils are led to resort to unfamiliar language patterns to suit the roles they are playing. Drama thus has the capacity for sensitising the ear for appropriate registers and responses. It encourages linguistic adaptability, often accustoming the children to unfamiliar modes of language. What is said in drama will belong to a particular context of situation, which may take the form of a quarrel, a discussion among equals, persuasion, provocation or some similar language activity. By playing out roles and situations of this sort, some close to and some remote from his own experience, a child is using language for the development of his whole personality as well as for exploring personalities other than his own. And it must be added that the opportunity for fantasy roles, such as heroes, spirits, and monsters, usually through mythology, is at least as important as acting out the more familiar themes from everyday life.

10.37 The best of improvised drama can bring out unsuspected resources in children whose work in written English may not be promising. This is especially true if the stimulus material is well chosen for the language possibilities it contains. Owing to the difficulty of transcribing improvised speech in school drama, not many examples are readily available, but a good illustration occurs in the DES Drama Survey (11) of 1968. Here, some primary school children had been studying effects of the plague on a village in the 17th Century, and they improvised for 40 minutes on the story of a woman accused of being a witch.

10.38 The good teacher of drama, like the good teacher of any subject, needs to be able to say what he means by progression, not only from one kind of activity to another, but from one year to the next. Whether he regards himself as a teacher of English or more exclusively as a drama specialist, language cannot be denied an important place in his educational philosophy. His criteria of competence may differ from those of the English specialist, but the activities of the two cannot be divorced from one another without loss to both. Although drama offers scope for social language which is characteristically unplanned and open-ended, many teachers find it profitable to move from this into written English. The very young children in particular gain from such a transition; a common illustration would be the poems and stories produced by infant school children following dramatic improvisation on the themes of Hallowe'en or Guy Fawkes. Teachers claim that the quality of the writing gains in honesty and liveliness where drama has been a starting point, notably where it has been included in an integrated studies course of any kind. History, religious education and social studies, indeed all subjects, can benefit from a dramatic realisation of people and situations; and this will be as real to the pupil in terms of speech as in the feeling and imagination he is able to bring to it.

10.39 In spite of these arguments, however, it must be said that drama is still often unrecognised as a means of developing language in the secondary school. Though they would certainly regard drama as coming within their province, many English departments, even in large comprehensive schools, are without a member of staff confident enough or interested enough to make it a part of English. Of our sample of 939 teachers working with twelve year olds a mere 21 would regard themselves as trained drama specialists, either through a main course at a college of education or through a teaching qualification at a professional drama school. Of the 1,052 working with fourteen year olds, 26 had such a qualification. The survey also showed that opportunities for improvised work diminished sharply between the two age points, while the use of a printed text increased. The average weekly time on improvisation at fourteen was less than a third of that at twelve, and the time for work from a printed text had doubled.

10.40 Interesting developments are occurring in CSE and O Level, and the number of CSE Mode 3 examinations has continued to grow. In the words of one county English and Drama adviser this has 'already given drama teachers a much needed edge to their work'. We welcome the growth in opportunities that this could promise, especially if it results in more experience of drama for older secondary school pupils. We do, however, have one important reservation. In devising the Mode 3 syllabuses a number of teachers are placing heavy emphasis on the 'history of theatre', with an undue weight on the learning of facts completely detached from any practical work. It would be unfortunate if a quest for 'academic respectability' for the subject led to an increase in syllabuses of this type. In our view the greatest value to be gained from the development of examination work would be in expansion of the kind of complementary activity described in paragraph 10.33.

10.41 Whatever view is taken of improvised drama by heads of English departments, there is too rarely any constructive or detailed discussion of its place in English teaching. Too little thought has been given to the various possible organisational models by which drama can be incorporated into a school timetable. We believe that every secondary school should examine such fundamental questions as the following, in relation to its own circumstances:

(i) Should drama be a separate subject with its own department? If not, should it be taught by drama specialists within an English department, or by all English teachers? Is there greater value in a combination of both policies? (Our survey showed that 10 per cent of secondary schools in the sample had a separate drama department. 19 per cent of all the schools had a drama studio).

(ii) Should it be the policy of the drama or English department to encourage teachers in other subjects to use drama in their work?

(iii) What language resources does drama call upon in individual pupils, according to their ability, background, etc? What are their speech patterns in the home, at play, and in the classroom, and how can drama be made to benefit these?

(iv) What areas of language growth are neglected in other kinds of English teaching, and which of these may be regarded as particularly the province of drama?

(v) Are there differences of criteria in language work from the points of view of drama specialist and English teacher?

(vi) What is the role of the teacher in improvised drama, particularly in the development of language?

References

1. Barnes D et al Language, the Learner, and the School Penguin Education: 1971.

2. Sinclair J et al The English Used by Teachers and Pupils unpublished research report: University of Birmingham.

3. Labov W Phonological Correlates of Social Stratification American Anthropology, 66 No. 6(2): 1964.

4. Whitehall H Structural Essentials of English (revised edition): Longmans: 1958.

5. The Certificate of Secondary Education: Trial Examinations - Oral English Schools Council Examinations Bulletin No. 11. HMSO: 1966.

6. See L. Stenhouse The Humanities Project: An Introduction The Schools Council-Nuffield Humanities Project. Heinemann Educational Books Limited: 1970.

7. Pratt E Experimental Evaluation of a Program for the Improvement of Listening Elementary School Journal, Vol. 56: March 1956.

8. Op cit. at 5 above.

9. Adams A Free Talk and the Teaching of English Spoken English, Vol. 2 No. 2. English Speaking Board: 1969.

10. Chomsky N Language and Mind Harcourt, Brace, and Ward: 1968.

11. DES Education Survey 2: Drama (pp. 12-13) HMSO: 1968.