Importance of oracy in English for EAL learners
For learners who are acquiring English, the role of talk in English is important not only for their subject learning, but for their developing proficiency in English. It is this proficiency that will influence their level of attainment (Lindorff et.al. 2025)
In an English as an Additional Language (EAL) context, language is often divided into social and academic. Emphasis is rightly awarded to the academic vocabulary and structures needed to access curriculum content and, ultimately, pass tests and exams. However, the social aspect of language, with its links to wellbeing and belonging, is equally important, especially to early stage and recently arrived multilingual learners, who are adjusting to a new culture and community.
In order to develop social language in English, learners need to be in social situations where they can hear and use English, be that in playgrounds, clubs, sporting activities and other extra-curricular activities, or in the classroom. Teachers can harness this social language as a basis for developing more academic language, and as a foundation for reading and writing in English.
In classrooms, social and academic language often overlap, or mesh together. Educational theorists, including Vygotsky and Mercer, have highlighted the value of what Mercer calls “‘exploratory talk”’, which helps to extend thinking and learning through engaging with others’ ideas in a supportive setting. This is what some multilingual learners may have missed doing in English (but not other languages they use) over a long break like the summer holidays.
Strategies for English oracy for multilingual learners
The strategies below have been designed to create opportunities across the school, in classrooms and at home, for multilingual learners to develop their proficiency in English oracy.
Whole-school strategies
A good starting point is to make sure that teachers are aware of each individual learner’s level of proficiency in English and in oracy in particular, using robust assessment procedures, such as The Bell Foundation’s award-winning EAL Assessment Framework. Next is to design a plan for each learner to help them progress.
Talk to the learners: Find out about their experiences over the holidays and use that as a basis for further discussions. Encourage children to document all the language they used in the holidays, and in what contexts, to build a picture of their full repertoire.
Arrange buddy groups: New arrivals particularly benefit from buddies, who can help them navigate both the academic and social aspects of school while also modelling language.
Set up a conversation café: This could be a lunchtime or after-school activity. Volunteers who are fluent in English (for example older learners or sixth formers from partner schools) sit around at tables and chat to multilingual learners. This can be popular with sixth formers who are interested in teaching as a career, or to satisfy Duke of Edinburgh criteria. It can take various forms, for example using conversation prompt cards or playing board games.
Facilitate language in action: More ambitious, fun, and potentially a great deal messier, set up activities like clay modelling, gardening, or building a worm farm. Any activity which nurtures social talk will do. Think about what will work in your context.
Encourage translanguaging: Make space for talk in all the languages your learners use, so that they can build their English fluency on the basis of the language they already know.
Classroom strategies
Building on these whole-school strategies, here are some classroom strategies which focus on oracy for EAL learners:
Promote talk: Start by placing learners in pairs and small groups. This provides opportunities for multilingual learners to listen, practise, rehearse and gain confidence before they speak to a larger group or the whole class. Setting clear ground rules about valuing contributions, listening attentively, and responding positively will make all learners feel more comfortable about speaking aloud.
Build a word wall: Add new words, including in all the languages your learners use, with translations. Every so often, as an end of lesson activity, ask the learners to construct a sentence using a number of the new words, or give a definition of a word for learners to identify.
Use collaborative activities: These include sequencing exercises, jigsaw activities, and graphic organisers which encourage exploratory talk. They can then be developed into more formal presentations. You will need to model and make explicit the linguistic changes which occur when casual speech becomes formalised.
Use Dictogloss: Dictogloss is a type of supported dictation. The teacher reads a short, curriculum-related text several times and the learners try to produce their own version as close to the original as possible. It may introduce some new vocabulary or sentence structures, and helps develop the links between listening, speaking, and writing.
Talk less so that learners can talk more: Research in primary classrooms in Hampshire, in the Talk-Rich Teaching Project (Flynn, 2025) has shown that when teachers limit the amount of talking they do, multilingual learners talk more, and teachers find themselves listening more closely to what their learners have to say. Start with small steps, such as developing learning questions to stimulate talk, or making your instructions more comprehensible by using less language.
Arrange drama and role play: There are many ways to use this across the curriculum and you are not required to be a proficient actor, nor does the classroom have to be turned upside down. For example, you could play reporter and interview learners who are witnesses to, say, the Roman invasion of AD43. Drama and role play create opportunities for practising speaking in meaningful contexts and for new-to-English learners to communicate with peers (see below).
Make space for all the languages your learners use: Successful bilinguals (and those who use more than two languages), move fluidly between the languages they know, as they navigate curriculum content. Make sure that in discussions and activities, multilingual learners are free to draw on words, concepts, and ways of expressing themselves in the language they feel more comfortable in, as they build understanding. This translanguaging is a productive strategy in which the language a learner knows provides a foundation for learning English and in English.
Homework strategies
It is difficult to set speaking homework, but here are a few ideas which might be useful, depending on your context. Speaking is intrinsically linked to listening, which can be done at home. Homework can also be used to prepare for speaking activities, which will give learners time to engage in inner speech and think about how they will formulate their thoughts for an audience.
Older pupils might be able to make a video or podcast. For example, instead of completing written work about the Roman army, they could prepare and film a three-minute talk on the topic or record themselves answering questions.
Learners can research a topic at home with a view to discussing it in class. This could involve parents/carers. For older pupils, this could be part of jigsaw activities where each member of a group researches a different aspect of the topic and information is pooled, thus necessitating speaking and listening. The group could then construct a presentation, transforming their group discussions into more formal language.
Reading and listening to stories and other texts at home, in any language, can provide the basis for oral activities such as storytelling, dramatising stories, and conversations about books in class.
Learners can watch videos, listen to podcasts and interviews, and so on which provide curriculum content alongside models of spoken English.
Outside activities such as nature walks or surveys – which are then reported back in class – might be a welcome activity. These could involve parents/carers and speaking in family languages.
Conclusion
Long breaks from the classroom can have a big impact on the use of English for multilingual learners. However, with the right strategies – whole-school, classroom, and homework – schools can create opportunities for learners to hear and practise both social and academic language, as they build confidence as speakers of English.
A version of this article first appeared in Headteacher Update on 21 September 2021 and SecEd on 20 September 2021.
Other resources and references
Mercer, N. The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk amongst Teachers and Learners 1995. Multilingual Matters.