This introductory chapter provides a brief survey of working definitions of oracy, including a history of the concept in British educational thought, and offers ways of contextualising the idea within broader debates over speaking and listening in popular culture.

This chapter examines the concept of L2 speaking by detailing several technologies that can be used to support the development of oral production in a foreign language. Relevant theoretical and historical concepts are first discussed to give readers a foundation to understand the factors that influence the L2 speaking process. The next sections delve into emerging technologies that show promise in supporting speaking development. The chapter concludes with future directions related to L2 speaking teaching and learning.

Chapter 3 emphasises the importance of developing skills among pupils progressively throughout language learning and discusses how each skill complements the others to improve overall communicative competence. Practical advice on how to develop each individual skill is given, as well as how to create multi-skill and multi-task activities. Tasks designed to give student teachers practice in developing these individual skills are included. The development of reading skills is given particular attention, as this is an area which can affect the others if not given due care and consideration.

A study conducted in the United States found that people fear speaking in public to an unknown audience more than spiders, heights, going to the doctor, and thunder and lightning. If you are among the many people that become anxious at the thought of having to speak in front of others, you are not alone. However, public speaking and delivering oral presentations are skills that can be developed, refined and mastered.

This chapter explores the basic and advanced skills needed to deliver an effective oral presentation. We present various techniques you can use to improve your oral presentation skills to deliver successful academic and professional presentations, including ways of overcoming the ‘butterflies’ associated with public speaking.

Chapter 1 discusses the role of target language production, or output, in the language learning process. Through examining hypotheses in the field of second language acquisition, as well as learner data, the authors consider why it is important for learners to have the opportunity to talk and write in the language they are learning. Strategies for how to structure these types of interactions and how to promote language production in learner-centered lessons are also included.

Learning vocabulary through listening is one type of learning through meaning-focused input. Learners need at least 95 per cent coverage of the running words (around 3,000 word families) in the informal spoken input in order to gain reasonable comprehension and to have reasonable success at guessing unknown vocabulary from context clues. A well-balanced listening and speaking course includes opportunities to learn through listening to monologues and interactive communication, opportunities to learn from speaking and interacting with others, the deliberate study of pronunciation, vocabulary and multiword units, and grammar, and opportunities to become fluent in listening and speaking. This chapter includes a large range of activities to provide these opportunities, and describes how teachers can design speaking activities so that vocabulary is more likely to be learned. The research shows that those who observe speaking activities are just as likely to learn the vocabulary in the activities as those who actively participate

Many children seem to learn to talk effortlessly, perhaps because they are treated as meaning-makers from the moment they are born. As Alexander writes, talk plays a powerful role in a child’s learning and yet, sometimes once a child can talk, we pay little attention to the ongoing development of speaking and active listening. This chapter begins by focusing on how children become competent oral communicators in the home, in early childhood contexts and at school. The central role of storying and storytelling in learning both language and culture, including the role of oral narrative in Australia’s First Nations cultures, is also considered in helping us understand why oracy underpins learning to read and write. This chapter documents how speaking and listening are represented in both the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the Australian Curriculum: English. Finally, a range of teaching and learning instructional strategies that foster the ongoing development of children’s speaking and listening are explored.

This chapter discusses the commonalities and differences between reading and listening by focusing on the commonalities and differences between writing and speaking. Common to writing and speaking is that they are both activities that normally have a fourfold intentionality: (1) they are performed intentionally; (2) they are targeted at other people; (3) they are about things; and (4) they are the means by which the author intends to reach certain aims. Next, I discuss Paul Ricoeur's views on the distinction between writing and speaking, in which the notion of autonomy plays an important role. It is argued that Ricoeur is not successful in bringing out the distinction that he is groping for and that a more adequate view on the distinction should make use of the idea that at least some writing is creative‐investigative – that is, some writing is such that an author would not and even could not have formed the thoughts and ideas expressed in their text if they had not engaged in writing.

The bulk of the work on non-native speech has focused on average differences between L1 and L2 speakers. However, there is growing evidence that variability also plays an important role in distinguishing L1 from L2 speech. While some studies have demonstrated greater variability for non-native than native speech (e.g., Baese-Berk & Morrill, 2015; Wade et al., 2007), others have demonstrated that under some circumstances non-native speech maybe less variable and that variability in non-native speech may shift as a function of many factors, including task (Baese-Berk & Morrill, to appear; Baese-Berk, Morrill, & Bradlow, 2016) and L1-L2 pairing (Vaughn, Baese-Berk, & Idemaru, to appear). In the present study, we ask how variability manifests in L1 and L2 speech by speakers from a variety of language backgrounds. Specifically, we ask whether a speaker whose L1 speaking rate is highly variable is also highly variable in their L2. We also ask whether variability in speaking rate in L1 or L2 differs as a function of task (e.g., read vs. spontaneous speech) and complexity of the task (e.g., more or less complicated reading passages). The results of this study will inform our understanding of the myriad complex factors that influence non-native speech.

In Chapter 10 you were introduced to the IRAC framework for legal thinking, one of the most common fundamental approaches to working through a legal problem. On its own, IRAC seems quite simple — and it is, which is the beauty of it. However, if legal arguments were that simple, nobody would ever need to consult a lawyer! In this chapter, we take that basic IRAC process and start to add skills around it. By the end of this chapter you should have some idea about how to utilise IRAC and how to do so in a way that constructs compelling legal arguments.

This chapter summarizes the arguments of previous chapters.

This chapter shows how the patterns of speech outlined in the previous chapters support proposals for a tripartite structure of Hebrews; however, these patterns are especially prevalent in the first two sections, but break down some in the third. This chapter discusses the spoken quotations in the third section of Hebrews (10:19–13:25) and demonstrates how the author develops his motifs from the previous sections. This section also shows how the author’s spoken quotations relate to the opening prologue in which the Father speaks “to us” through the Son, even though no quoted speech from the Son is ever directed to the addressees in Hebrews.

Chapter 20 discusses the importance of good speaking skills and strategies, and its authors present the findings about what a good language teacher does to draw on pedagogical content knowledge for speaking instruction.