Drama Strategy: Drama for Oracy

Talk in schools has been referred to in many ways, for example oracy, speaking and listening, spoken language, spoken communication. Whatever we call it, drama strategies have much to offer.

Professor Robin Alexander (2017) recognises the unique contribution drama makes to oracy:

‘Children's capacities to use talk to reason, argue, explain, explore, justify, challenge, question, negotiate, speculate, imagine, evaluate, and in these and other ways to take ownership of their talking and thinking rather than merely answer someone else's usually closed questions. Such talk, unusual in the teaching of mainstream subjects, is actually not unlike that habitually deployed and encouraged in performance arts, for example in the kind of discussion that might be generated to support and explore improvised drama.’