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Exploring oracy assessment in-interaction in the primary school classroom
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Wall, Helena H. (2022) Exploring oracy assessment in-interaction in the primary school classroom. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3940899
Abstract
Oracy (skills in spoken language) is a life skill (Wilkinson, 1965), a medium of learning (Jones, 2017) and a facilitator of literacy and second language acquisition (Amorsen & Wilson, 2016; Pinter, 2017). However, in 2018 over 1.4m children in the UK were identified as having speech, language and communication needs (I CAN & The Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists); since which time, the reduction in face-to-face interaction during the Covid-19 lockdown has adversely impacted many children’s oracy development (Henshaw, 2021).
Oracy is formatively assessed through teacher observation of children’s interactions within the Early Years Foundation Stage statutory framework and the Key Stage 1 (KS1) English programme of study. The aim of this study is to investigate how teachers enact oracy socialisation of their pupils in these age groups.
To achieve this, the study utilises an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach to generate an innovative conceptualisation of oracy as the negotiation of interactional norms. Specifically, the study investigates how teachers and children enact their interactional roles through the negotiation of classroom norms.
I utilise observations of classroom interactions between teachers and their pupils aged 4-6, bringing together audiovisual recordings of naturally-occurring lesson and assessment activities and oracy-centric learning activities designed by myself. I utilise embodiment analysis to explore how the teachers (and, in group interactions, peers) socialise children into performing classroom oracy norms by encouraging oracy behaviours that are preferred by the teacher and discouraging those that are dispreferred. I further explore how the children contribute to their own and peers’ socialisation in their negotiation of these norms.
My findings demonstrate four norms that are expressed as salient across the dataset. The teachers (and, to a lesser extent, peers) use praise, modelling, and other positive feedback strategies to encourage these norms and sanctioning and other negative feedback strategies to discourage children’s behaviours that breach these norms. My findings further indicate that children negotiate these norms to perform agentic and receptive styles of the learner role.
The theoretical innovation of this study unites the field of sociolinguistics with oracy education research. This work is relevant to sociolinguists in the field of language socialisation, as well as to oracy researchers and practitioners shaping oracy provision, as it seeks to further our understanding of how children develop their oracy competence through their interactions with teachers in the classroom context.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary Education P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Children -- Language, Communication in education, Oral communication, Education, Primary, Sociolinguistics | ||||
Official Date: | December 2022 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Centre for Applied Linguistics | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Angouri, Jo ; Pinter, Annamaria | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | 249 pages : colour illustrations | ||||
Language: | eng |
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