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Julia Strong: We must put listening and speaking back in the Literacy Hour

From a Royal Society of Arts lecture, by the deputy director of the National Literacy Trust

Tuesday 09 July 2002 00:00 BST
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Here are some ingredients that teachers of any age tend to throw into their teaching repertoire, with scores of their effectiveness in helping students to retain information: explaining to others 90 per cent, practice by doing 75 per cent, discussion 50 per cent, demonstrations 30 per cent, audio-visual 20 per cent, reading 10 per cent, listening 5 per cent. What stunned me about this list was how far down reading and listening were.

What's this got to do with the literacy hour? For a start, explaining to others has been put at the centre of teachers' practice through the literacy hour and it's very important. It's a common experience to get halfway through explaining something to somebody and then realise you don't know what you're talking about. I don't believe any teacher has not experienced that.

When it happens you have to go back to your source of information, you have to refine your knowledge until you can understand what it is you have to say, and that means that you can explain to others. Once you can explain to others, you remember what it is you're saying, so it's an absolute tool.

I want to answer the "Why did they bother anyway?" question. It was because researchers had gone into primary schools in England and they had said that children were spending far too long reading and far too long writing and not spending long enough in being taught how to read and taught how to write. That's a very simplistic explanation, but but that is the essence of it. It's a very interesting difference. What they were trying to do was to provide teachers with the tools to help children to read and write.

The trouble was, because they were focusing so much on reading and writing, they did rather forget the speaking and listening, and speaking and listening underpin the reading and writing. Now it's being sorted out backwards and there are ideas of bringing in backwards objectives for speaking and listening, but we have gone through to this debate without there being a single speaking and listening objective in primary schools, which is a real shame, even though the essence of how the hour is delivered is full of superb-quality speaking and listening. So there's a shortfall there.

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