This is a v interesting contribution to the debate on defining oracy & I agree with many – but not all – of the points made & the way James frames oracy.
1. For me 'talk' does encompass speaking & listening. What is talk in pairs/groups if it doesn't involve listening? 1/

https://twitter.com/OracyCambridge/status/1800290633896325143

Talk for learning is all about the exchanges between teacher & students & peer exchanges. The word 'exchanges' expresses that key responsive element, with talk as a close synonym for 'discussion'. Listening is key, and one could substitute the words 'speaking & listening' but 2/

It’s very disappointing not to see any comment on the way Ofsted has sought to promote a set of highly ideological positions held by a narrow group of ‘experts’, using research in highly distorting ways. So much so that subject bodies & quoted researchers have publicly 1/

https://twitter.com/marywbousted/status/1740726690936991985

…dissociated themselves from the research reports. These research reports have been a major part of their framing of what they’re looking for in schools. They have put ITT in a straitjacket, imposing their pet ideas, strictly requiring adherence & preventing courses from...2/

To @nadhimzahawi: Choices always have to be made in exam specs. For O Level in 1971, in a very traditional girls' grammar school, I studied Ted Hughes, Clifford Dyment & James Kirkup. No Larkin. No Owen. That was it! In those OCR 45 poems, favourites of mine & yours...1/

https://twitter.com/nadhimzahawi/status/1539882196118511620

& others will have been left out. What's been missing is really great contemporary poetry – the 'classics' of the future, if you like. Have you read Caleb Femi, Raymond Antrobus, Ilya Kaminsky, Teresa Lola & others now included? Perhaps you don't follow the big literary prizes.2/

A provocation of sorts this am... We can either watch English AL numbers decline & feel depressed about what's happening & see it decline further or...we can do something about it. Some things are out of our control but others are not. Here are a few things I think we can do. 1/ 1. Make English enjoyable & interesting for its own sake. That means keeping exam practice till the end, not years of making the focus exams.
2. Make KS3 varied, rich, engaging, with text choices that grab hold of students & pull them into the world of books.
2/

To start the ball rolling on thinking about fair, effective & manageable teacher assessment instead of (or alongside v light touch exams this coming summer – here's a short thread to provoke discussion..... 1. Remove Progress 8 measures for 2020/21. Remove that from the equation. 2. Teachers assess their own students. 2. Departments set up a small group of experienced staff to moderate, based on 2 pieces of work by every student, to look at consistency across the school....

A few things that 'matter' for me in English teaching: 1. There must be opportunities to 'think' as well as 'know'. Knowing involves thinking. 2. Response is important, before, during & after reading. 3. The exploratory is a route to the formal, critical. 4. Choice matters... ..to develop taste & pleasure, in reading & writing. 5. Books should be age-appropriate & diverse (the canon, YA fiction & much more.) 6. The creative & the critical should work in conjunction with each other. 7. Dialogic classrooms are essential for many of the above. 8. Talk..

A few thoughts on retrieval. 1. I thought we were now supposed to be talking about knowledge. Retrieval talk is more pedagogy in my book. 2. If we're going to talk about retrieval, we need to talk a lot more about what's worth retrieving and that *is* a question of knowledge! 1 3. We need to ask whether retrieval in English is the same as in Science, History or other subjects. If a topic in Y9 requires knowledge from Y7, retrieving that knowledge is important. In English does work on a Shakespeare play in Y9 require knowledge from a Sh play in Y7? 2

Saw some KS3 English slides recently - a lesson on a topic, multiple slides crammed with writing, supposedly full of 'knowledge' but none of it what I'd call rich, powerful or any other adjective denoting quality in terms of English as a subject. What on earth is happening? It's hard to critique without sounding harsh & judgemental but we are at risk of killing off the subject imo. Be clear – it's not the teachers who are at fault. There are immense pressures on them from a system sending out the wrong messages about what knowledge in English is.