The voice of students in the classroom: The practice of orality

Abstract

This paper is a summary of a Master’s dissertation and is related to a proposal of working with formal orality in the classroom. This proposal, called “Orality class”, involves a space in the Portuguese classes where students present, once a week, a theme (any one) in front of the class. Through my professional experience developing for years these classes with elementary school students during the Master’s degree, I investigated 5th grade students who participated in “orality classes”. The “classes” were analyzed trough the “conversation analysis” (Marcuschi, 1991). A growing development was found, because with every presentation the students showed more ease and took better care of their oral speech. It was also perceived that the school uses and demands from students the standard (linguistic) variant that is socially sanctioned, although it doesn’t create conditions for them to experience the formalization of oral language itself. The act talking in public is a challenge that can only be overcome if there are possibilities to render this practice operational, because real situations involving the use of formal oral language by students outside of the school environment are rare.

Key words: teaching and learning, orality, Portuguese language.