Julia Snell

Open Letter to the Prime Minister - Voice 21

📣 2 years ago, Sir Keir Starmer pledged to embed #oracy in the curriculum. Today, a coalition of parliamentarians, education experts & schools are calling on him to deliver on that pledge.

Read the letter here: voice21.org/open-letter/

According to @snelljulia.bsky.social:

“Pupils who experience dialogic teaching and learning will develop their oral language skills, gain confidence and build relationships (by becoming more patient and attuned to others’ perspectives)."

Read full article here 👇
voice21.org/voice-21-lau...

Thanks. Would love to hear your thoughts if you do!

me and @snelljulia.bsky.social are doing a joint keynote at this UKLA/NEU conference, talking about futures of linguistic justice and designing linguistically just schools 💜

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/literacy-i...

@lahri.bsky.social
@universityofleeds.bsky.social

And thanks to @iancushing.bsky.social
for feedback on an early draft and for general encouragement, collegiality and inspiration!

Using linguistic ethnography to uncover the mechanisms through which underprivileged students are denied access to classroom dialogue This article opens up the ‘black box’ of classroom interaction to investigate why opportunities to participate in academically productive (or ‘dialogic’) classroom discussion may be more readily av...

Thanks for reading, please do look at the full article, available open access here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10..... This research was supported by a @leverhulme.ac.uk Research Fellowship.

It is crucial that we develop this approach in educational research and build an ethnographic evidence base that can challenge deficit thinking and better inform educational policy and decision making.

Linguistic ethnographic research is important in leading this change. It rejects universalizing assumptions about students and seeks to understand the complex and intricate ways in which local classroom practices connect with the wider institutional and sociopolitical order.

However, ideologies & educational reforms do not influence classroom practice in a linear ‘top down’ way; there is negotiation in classrooms between bottom-up meaning making processes & broader institutional and socio-political processes, which opens up possibilities for change.

These three mechanisms have relevance beyond the focal schools since they are underpinned by widespread beliefs/ideologies about underprivileged students and systemic pressures (e.g. frequent student testing, league tables) that influence classrooms internationally.

Yet, in peer-group conversations recorded on the margins of classroom activity, these students showed themselves to be mature and independent thinkers with a propensity for dialogue.

Student characteristics (e.g. laziness), behaviour (e.g. not listening), or (lack of) ability were invoked as reasons for their lack of understanding or missed learning opportunities, thus obscuring the need for institutional or systemic change.

Third, in line with neoliberal accountability logics, students at the Lower SES school were held responsible for education failures.

The Lower SES school prioritised compliance and rote following of procedure over independent student thinking. The students were perceived to be immature, lacking in ability, and prone to disobedience; thus, their voices, bodies & behaviour were micromanaged.

Second, there were competing approaches to managing classroom roles, routines & relationships. Students in both schools were expected to show respect for the teacher, but boundaries between teacher and student were more clearly demarcated and enforced at the Lower SES school.

At the Higher SES school, there was space for students to participate in classroom talk, but at the Lower SES school, student talk was actively discouraged and often met with reprimands and punishment, which had enduring effects on students.

Close analysis of classroom interaction across both schools identified three mechanisms driving disparities in student participation. First, there were different assumptions about the purposes of classroom talk and how students should participate.

Prior research has attributed similar disparities to students’ social class backgrounds and perceived deficiencies in their communicative abilities. However, the article challenges this deficit thinking and demonstrates the need to attend instead to the classroom context.

Quantitative analysis revealed significant disparities in student talk time between the two participating schools, with students in the Higher Socioeconomic Status (SES) school contributing substantially more to whole-class discussions.

Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research in two socioeconomically differentiated primary schools, this article investigates why dialogic discussion is more readily available to some groups of students than others and how we can disrupt this problematic dynamic.

The talk children encounter at school has consequences for their learning. Children who participate in ‘dialogic’ classroom discussions do better than their peers who have not had this experience. Yet, such talk is relatively rare in schools serving underprivileged students.

New research published in @languageeducation.bsky.social, available open access here (tinyurl.com/bdf262jp) and a short thread on the work below. Many thanks to the reviewers & editors for their feedback and to @leverhulme.ac.uk for funding support.

Fantastic resource providing a series of ‘talking points’ to support schools on their oracy journeys. Happy to have contributed a piece on why dialogic classrooms are so important for learning. I’d love to here what you think 👇

Using linguistic ethnography to uncover the mechanisms through which underprivileged students are denied access to classroom dialogue This article opens up the ‘black box’ of classroom interaction to investigate why opportunities to participate in academically productive (or ‘dialogic’) classroom discussion may be more readily av...

I’ve just read a very significant, utterly compelling article by @snelljulia.bsky.social on her research on classroom dialogue. If you read just one piece of research on Oracy between now and the summer, make it this! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Language and LGBTQ+ Youth This book takes a queer linguistic and intersectional approach to the analysis of young LGBTQ+ people's identity constructions, showing how their language use r…

We were very lucky to have an inspiring talk from @lucyjones.bsky.social at @universityofleeds.bsky.social yesterday. If you want to know how to conduct effective intersectional analysis, read her book when it’s released later this year. Mine is on preorder! www.bloomsbury.com/uk/language-...

It was a privilege to be at the inaugural lecture of my colleague
@cgregoriou.bsky.social this evening, which included a theatrical adaptation of the memoirs of a Greek Cypriot sergeant in the British Army during WWII. Fantastic stuff!

New blog with Julia Snell @snelljulia.bsky.social published by the Higher Education Policy Institute @hepi-news.bsky.social

💡We encourage Higher Education senior leaders to take proactive steps to tackle accent bias to foster a more inclusive and equitable Higher Education system.

KNOWLEDGE FOR ORACY
A full-day teacher conference to help schools get to grips with the language knowledge that teachers need to make oracy a success @barbarableiman.bsky.social @englangblog.bsky.social @robdrummond.bsky.social @lucystrike7.bsky.social englishandmedia.co.uk/courses/632d...

My lovely UG student is investigating differences between GCSE & A-level English Lang curriculums & reasons for the decrease in numbers of students studying Eng Lang A-level. If you teach A Level students (of any subject) could you ask them to complete this survey? shorturl.at/ghgXI