- Listening and speaking are often viewed as "soft skills" rather than essential academic competencies. This leads to less instructional focus and practice time devoted to oral language development.
- Reading and writing achievement are more easily measured via standardized assessments. Since school accountability systems focus on these measurable outcomes, listening and speaking get sidelined.
- Traditional teacher-centered instructional models emphasize transmission of knowledge over student discussion and verbal engagement with ideas.
- Lack of teacher preparation in leading effective discussions, seminars, debates and oracy presentations also contributes to the neglect of speaking and listening skills.
- Crowded curricula leave little room for perceived "extras" like oral language development. Administrators and teachers may see it as expendable.
- A renewed focus on listening and speaking as foundational academic skills is essential for literacy achievement and deeper learning across subject areas. Instruction in oral proficiency "oracy" should be elevated as a top instructional priority.
Abstract
This paper argues that developing strong academic listening and speaking skills should be a core focus of literacy education, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on cognitive science research and pedagogical theory, it is contended that oral language proficiency provides the vital foundation for reading comprehension and written expression. The paper chronicles the evolution of one teacher’s perspective on the primacy of listening and speaking for early reading success, shaped by experience and study. It advocates for greater emphasis on instruction in key oral competencies like active listening, thoughtful response, respectful discussion and formal presentation. With the proper scaffolds in place, all students can achieve new heights in academic language.
Keywords: Oracy, academic language, listening skills, speaking skills, early literacy, reading comprehension
Introduction
Over a 24-year teaching career starting out in a Title 1 school with a high percentage of Hispanic and English language learning students, I came to recognize the essential foundation provided by competency in academic listening and speaking. My perspective evolved under the mentorship of impactful literacy programs, meaningful texts and transformative professional development opportunities. This paper will trace that intellectual journey and make the case that oral language development deserves renewed focus as the gateway to reading proficiency, synthesizing relevant studies with hands-on pedagogical experience.
When I began as a self-contained early elementary teacher, the school had adopted the Success For All (SFA) reading program as its core literacy curriculum. SFA emphasizes phonics, phonemic awareness and repeated reading to build decoding skills and fluency (Slavin et al., 1996). While adhering to these daily blocks helped install needed foundational skills, I ultimately realized that SFA’s real success in our population came from its systematic efforts to expand students’ vocabulary and background knowledge through listening and speaking.
Stephen Covey's maxim "first things first" perfectly captures the importance of prioritizing academic listening and speaking skills.Covey argues that effective people focus first on important rather than urgent activities. Activities that build critical long-term skills get precedence over those with only short-term impact.Applying this principle to education, listening and speaking are clearly "first things" that require educators' focus. They lay the vital foundation for literacy and learning. All students need robust opportunities to develop academic oral proficiency through instruction and practice.As Covey would advise, what matters most must never be at the mercy of what matters least. Academic listening and speaking skills are essential; they must come first in any balanced curriculum. Time devoted explicitly to building students' oral competencies is an investment that will compound benefits across their schooling and lives.
The Importance of Listening
Cognitive scientists have long acknowledged listening comprehension as a critical prerequisite to reading comprehension. To construct meaning from text, children must first possess the oral language skills to process vocabulary and grasp linguistic structure (Hoover & Gough, 1990). By first building mental representations through careful listening, students equip themselves to decode words on the page.
Listening matters even more for second language learners, who must use every oral encounter to soak up new words and absorb unfamiliar grammatical patterns. Yet our teaching often gives listening short shrift in favor of visible reading and writing activities. Songs, stories, discussions and presentations all represent powerful opportunities to boost listening capacity. Researchers have found strong correlations between oral vocabulary knowledge in preschool and later reading achievement (National Early Literacy Panel, 2009).
Speaking as a Bridge to Reading
If listening provides the essential input for language development, then speaking fuels its output. Through conversing, presenting, explaining and debating, students activate new vocabulary and syntactical forms. The exercise of producing speech lodges language patterns into memory and automaticity key for achieving reading fluency (Allington, 2001).
Rather than just “prepping” them for reading proper, speaking exercises merit curricular prioritization in their own right for building academic skills. Brisk verbal exchanges demand quick processing, flexible responses and attention to audience. Presentations teach organization and elaboration of ideas. Discussions model building on others’ thoughts. Far from distractions, quality talk experiences cement comprehension and ready students for transfer to independent reading.
Progression in Understanding
My own appreciation for the interconnectedness of listening, speaking and reading progressed steadily over my early teaching years. The detailed scope and sequence of SFA ensured I faithfully delivered targeted lessons in phonics, phonemes and oral repetition. While I sensed the value of these activities, the “why” behind their importance did not fully crystallize until encountering the educational philosophy of Paolo Freire.
In works like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1972) surfaced the creativity and knowledge within marginalized communities. He contended that superficial “banking models” of education, where teachers make “deposits” into passive students, must give way to dialogue, inquiry and critical consciousness. Exposure to these ideas helped me recognize the richness present in my bilingual students’ experiences. They needed opportunities to share their voices, not just practice discrete skills.
Another pivotal event came during a book study "Gifted and Talented Workshop based on Dr. Joyce VanTassel- Baska Acceleration Strategies for Teaching Gifted Learners. Her book outlined advanced oral language techniques like Socratic questioning, synthesis and evaluation that challenge students to think deeply about texts, exploring nuance and constructing new insights. I left the session determined to raise my pedagogical expectations and begin conducting regular “Socratic seminars” where students collaboratively wrestle with challenging ideas through dialogue. They would read and research to prepare, then practice active, responsive listening when speaking.
This led me to the work of Oscar Graybill and his Socratic Seminars International, pioneer of the modern Socratic method in teaching. Graybill founded Socratic Seminars International to help schools employ seminars for deep reading comprehension. His approach involves preparing by annotating texts, then participating in student-led discussions that build collective understanding (Graybill, 1997).
Graybill outlines practical strategies for seminar success like formulating open-ended questions, clarifying disagreements and ensuring equitable talk time. His methods validated for me the power of dialogue to unlock insights. With scaffolding, my students could collaboratively probe challenging texts through active speaking and listening. Exposure to Socratic Seminars International gave me a framework for implementation.
The Impact of Professional Texts
In looking to implement more ambitious listening and speaking activities, I encountered the work of educational philosopher Mortimer Adler. In his seminal How to Speak How to Listen (1997), Adler dissects the components of purposeful oral exchange, from thoughtful preparation to logical delivery. He advocates for elevating speech to an “art” meriting rigorous and explicit instruction. Adler’s companion volume, The Paideia Proposal (1982), further outlines how seminar discussions can open liberal arts learning to students across the socioeconomic spectrum.
These texts validated my growing belief that speaking and listening required greater curricular presence as disciplines unto themselves, not just reading precursors. They also provided practical frameworks for skillbuilding. In How to Speak How to Listen (1997), Adler offers step-by-step exercises for improving factors like poise, precision and voice modulation during presentations. His co-authored Paideia Program (1984) contains detailed lesson plans for equipping students to participate in collaborative discussions, build on others’ ideas and synthesize viewpoints.
Around the same time, I discovered Why Didn't I Learn This in College? by Paula Rutherford (2003). This guide masters the art of Socratic dialogue while cautioning against common pitfalls like rapid-fire questioning or asking leading questions with predetermined answers. Rutherford advocates developing seminars around “guides” full of powerful open-ended questions that spark deeper thinking. Her book gave me confidence that with patience and skillful planning, the most reluctant speakers could learn to engage thoughtfully.
Introducing and Using Syntopical Reading
The Evolution of Socratic Seminars
A pivotal event came during a Socratic Seminars International workshop led by founder Oscar Graybill. His seminar model involves preparing by annotating texts, then participating in student-led discussions that build collective understanding (Graybill, 1997). Attending Graybill’s professional development gave me practical strategies for success like crafting open-ended questions, clarifying disagreements and ensuring equitable talk time. I left convinced that with scaffolding, my students could collaboratively probe challenging texts through active speaking and listening.
My Deep Dive Into Syntopical Reading CLOSE READING
My final educational influence came through philosopher Christopher Phillips, founder of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry. I closely studied Phillips' seminal books like Socrates Cafe (2001) and Six Questions of Socrates (2004) which demonstrate how to convene engaging dialogues. Phillips introduced me to the lens of syntopical reading for generating Socratic conversations, developed by Adler and Van Doren.
Immersing myself in Phillips' writings expanded my understanding of facilitation techniques that empower thoughtful participation. I learned to radiate open-ended questions, clarify disagreements and synthesize viewpoints expressed. Phillips' methods made dialogic reading foundational to my curriculum, equipping students to collaboratively probe texts by activating higher-order speaking and listening skills. on the dynamics of high-quality dialogue. He introduced the lens of syntopical reading, an approach for generating Socratic conversations developed by Adler and Charles Van Doren in their 1940 classic, How to Read a Book.
Syntopical reading pushes students to analyze texts through four phases: elemental, inspectional, analytical and comparative. After summarizing key points, students explore how sources complement and contradict one another. This requires active speaking and listening as students build mental models for navigating diverse ideas. I incorporated training in syntopical methods into my seminar planning, teaching students to identify assumptions, evaluate evidence and form integrative conclusions.
Bringing It All Together
In summation, my personal pedagogical journey reveals the following key lessons that merit emphasis in any balanced literacy curriculum:
1. Listening comprehension forms the basis of reading comprehension. Targeted instruction should build vocabulary and content knowledge through songs, stories, discussions and presentations.
2. Speaking connects input to output, promoting automaticity with language patterns key for reading fluency. Oral activities also build academic skills like organization, elaboration and responsiveness.
3. Effective language education requires understanding each component’s purpose, not just covering discrete skills. Professional development texts provide teachers critical perspective.
4. Rigorous, scaffolded oral language curricula enable deep reading comprehension and analytical insight. Students learn to read complex texts actively and dialogically.
5. Speaking and listening require explicit instruction just like reading and writing. With practice using guided frameworks, all students can achieve new oral proficiency heights.
Conclusion
In today’s information-saturated society, the ability to extract and synthesize meaning across varied sources remains essential. All students deserve access to an education that cultivates analytical ears and thoughtful tongues. A false dichotomy between meaning and skills ignores their symbiotic roles in literacy development.
By elevating listening and speaking as objects of deliberate study, educators can fulfill the promise articulated by Ron Berger (2003) that “an argument can be made that chief among all the arts that human beings must master to thrive in the world are the arts of listening and speaking” (p. 1). This vision inspired my teaching journey and remains a worthy star to steer by.
References
Adler, M.J. (1982). The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto. Macmillan.
Adler, M.J. & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster.
Adler, M.J. (1997). How to Speak How to Listen. Touchstone.
Adler, M.J. (1984). The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus. Macmillan.
Allington, R.L. (2001). What Really Matters for Struggling Readers. Longman.
Berger, R. (2003). An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students. Heinemann.
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Hoover, W.A., & Gough, P.B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127-160.
National Early Literacy Panel (2009). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. National Institute for Literacy.
Phillips, C. (2010). Socrates cafe: A fresh taste of philosophy. W.W. Norton & Company.
Rutherford, P. (2003). Why Didn't I Learn This in College? Paideia.
Slavin, R.E., Madden, N.A., Dolan, L.J., & Wasik, B.A. (1996). Every child, every school: Success for All. Corwin Press.
Van Tassel-Baska, J. (2009). The integrated curriculum model (ICM). Learning and Individual Differences, 20(4), 345-357.
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