Oracy: The Transformative Power of Finding Your Voice
About this ebook
A manifesto on transformative power of finding your voice: a key driver of social mobility and an essential skill for our personal and professional lives.
For generations our education system has been built on the twin pillars of literacy and numeracy. But what if a third – and equally vital – pillar has been ignored? Enter oracy: communicating effectively, articulating ideas and engaging with others through spoken language.
In this persuasive and powerful manifesto, Neil Mercer calls for oracy, as a subject and a set of skills, to have equal footing alongside literacy and numeracy. Oracy can and must be taught, so that students leave school not only as readers and writers, but as accomplished speakers and listeners. Mercer incisively shows how oracy education has nothing to do with speaking ‘proper’, or eliminating style, slang and regional accents, but instead about empowering people to find and express their own voice. In fact, oracy is a key driver of cognitive development, academic attainment and social mobility – helping every young person to achieve their potential and challenge the inequalities of language and power.
Oracy: The Transformative Power of Finding Your Voice is the first book to bring this important step change in educational and social thinking to a wider audience. But it is also practical: a guide to how to use talk to teach critical thinking and find creative solutions to life’s burning issues. After all, the impact of oracy doesn’t stop at the school gates: we all need oracy skills for our personal relationships, professional networks and social lives.
About the author
Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, a Life Fellow at Hughes Hall and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has been a Visiting Fellow of the English Language Institute of Singapore, a judge of international speaking competitions for the English Speaking Union and was appointed as an Expert Advisor to the 2024 Independent Oracy Commission.
In 2019 he was given the Oevre Award by the European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction and in 2021 awarded the John Nisbet Fellowship by the British Educational Research Association for outstanding contributions to educational research.
