Oracy Idea: Serve and Return

A relative of mine remonstrated with another who was chattering away to his 14-month old.

“What are you talking to the baby for? He can’t speak yet.”

There’s a sort of double-take logical joke here, in which the surface plausibility of the question hides an obvious misunderstanding of how language works.

You may have heard of the “30 Million Word Gap”. 

The original claim was that children in some, predominantly white, highly-educated and middle class families in the US, had been exposed to 30 million more words by the time they started school, and that this correlated with language development and school achievement. 

Others pushed back to say that the original research focused too much on child-directed speech, and that children from disadvantaged African American families got a speech diet just as rich, but with more overheard, adult-directed speech from multiple speakers. 

The most recent work seems to support the view that yes, there’s not such a huge gap in the words children have heard if you include overheard conversations, but that what really counts is the quantity and quality of conversational turns a child has - and while there is a correlation with social class there are plenty of exceptions in both directions. 

In other words, you can talk at a child as much as you like, or have them listen in to adult conversation, but what really counts are the “serve and return” interactions in which adult or child speaks, and child or adult responds based on what they have heard. fMRI scans show greater brain activity in such interactions compared to other forms of speech and listening.

Doing the maths

If the gap that counts is conversational turns, not exposure to language, it is not enough for children to just be passive bystanders to speech. In a whole class discussion, even the most dominant speaker is spending perhaps 10% of the time in conversational turns. For less practised speakers it could be 0%. 

Whole class discussion favours confident speakers. It’s a “to he that hath, more shall be given” sort of thing, as is hands-up. But even if we are scrupulous about sharing the talk, whole class discussion doesn’t earn its keep, at least not in developing oracy.

What our less practised students need is more “Serve and Return” interactions. If we had an army of adults, we could have interventions that targeted our less practised speakers, and diminish the absolute difference between them and their more practised peers. 

We don’t have that army, but by giving all students more peer-to-peer opportunities for high quality serve and return interactions, we can still shrink the relative difference between these groups. We can’t make good the initial disadvantage of less practised speakers, but it becomes less significant in proportion to the increased store of practice both groups have. It’s a “rising tide floats all ships” thing - some just take longer to float!

Here are some very adaptable examples of Serve and Return interactions, starting with the very simplest.

Lists

From reception upwards, you can give a category and in a pair they go back and forth with examples of “tasty things”, “scary things”, “jobs” or whatever is relevant to what you’re teaching. 

As with many activities aimed at building particular skills, especially at a basic level, focus on the specific skills you want to develop - attention, turn-taking and relevance - and make everything else easy - accessible contexts, no complicated grammar. 

You can add elements of evaluation, imagination and humour by playing “Good Thing, Bad Thing”. First ask them to list animals that would make good pets. Then animals that would make bad pets - perhaps things that aren’t even animals that would make absolutely useless pets.

You can use lists in a more sophisticated way with older children by getting them to list examples - activating prior knowledge of a historical period, examples of friction, ways to describe a person’s movement across a street etc.

Escalators

These are great for exploring concepts and bringing in skills of comparison and evaluation. Start with a small example of e.g. bravery and go back and forth gradually increasing the bravery of the action until you reach the bravest thing you can imagine. You could then get them to retrace their steps as they head back down to where they started.

Repeaters

These activities involve some element of repeating or summarising what has been heard. 

At reception level, you might involve actions. One partner says and does something, the other repeats both words and actions - “I’m bouncing up and down”, “I’m touching my nose”. 

From Year 2 and with some Year 1 classes, you can use “You said, I think”. After the first contribution, each response starts with “You said…”(giving a summary of what the other person just said), followed by “I think….”(giving their response).

Can we have speech bubbles coming in from either side showing this please:

“I think I’d rather be a happy sheep, because I’d have a life free of worry.”

“You said you’d have life free of worry, but I think I’d rather be an unhappy genius, because there’s more to life than being content and tranquil.”

“So, you said there must be more to life than being content, but I think being content might itself be the most important thing.”

This activity captures the essence of Serve and Return. It’s an idealised form of dialogue that “shows its working”, one person listens, and the other not just saying something, but giving a genuine response that is conditioned by what they have just heard.

Directors

One person is the storyteller, one is the director. The director’s sole job is to help the storyteller tell the best story.

The storyteller begins their story. Using, “Once upon a time there was a…” is good for getting going.. When the director thinks it will be helpful, they can say “action” to get the story moving or “detail” for more description of whatever has just been mentioned. After a while they swap roles and continue the story.

You can add in further commands - setting, speech, sound, simile, pathetic fallacy etc. depending on your focus.