What we assess when we assess oracy
The Oracy Framework's four strands give us the anchor:
- Physical — voice, pace, body language, eye contact.
- Linguistic — vocabulary choice, sentence complexity, register.
- Cognitive — argument, reasoning, use of evidence, audience awareness.
- Social & emotional — listening, turn-taking, disagreement done well.
Practical structures that make assessment realistic
- One-minute talks — a stem, 60 seconds to prepare, 60 seconds to speak, rubric-tagged live.
- Structured debates — roles assigned, sentence stems provided, assessed on cognitive + social strands.
- Peer feedback — pupils use a simplified rubric on each other; teacher moderates.
- Recorded snapshots — three 90-second recordings per pupil per term. Enough evidence, low workload.
How LoftTalk fits in
LoftTalk lets pupils practise oracy with AI conversation partners across five languages, then auto-tags the response against the rubric strands. The teacher sees a clean progress profile without listening to every recording end-to-end. GCSE Speaking mode produces a printable four-tier report for the exam board record.
Common oracy assessment mistakes
- Assessing confidence and calling it oracy — confidence is not the same as reasoning.
- Penalising regional accent or dialect — assess the content, not the delivery accent.
- Only assessing extended monologue — dialogue is the harder and more useful skill.
- Rubric drift — publish and share the rubric with pupils before assessment, not after.
A term of oracy assessment in one page
- Week 1: teach the rubric explicitly. Pupils know what "good" looks like.
- Weeks 2–5: weekly one-minute talks or discussions, rubric-tagged in the moment.
- Week 6: recorded structured debate — the term's evidence piece.
- Weeks 7–12: repeat with a new topic, tracking movement on the two weakest strands.