Joyce Mosher, Associate Professor English Communications at Summit, has published an article in the e-journal for the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience, the premier Student Success organization in the country. Joyce’s article, Sound Practices: Performing College Reading and Writing, presents ways for student voices to sound in the classroom, and research that supports live aural and oral learning activities.Students learn from talking to each other. As Biggs (1999) notes, “People learn ten percent of what they read, and seventy percent of what they talk over with others” (p. 96). Face-to-face learning that recognizes aurality and orality as important literacies helps students establish habits of careful reading and effective writing—skills fundamental to college success (National Council of Teachers of English, 2008a, 2008b; Yancey, 2009).
Writing student verbalizes her idea for a conclusion to a research paper.
A pedagogy of aurality and orality ensures that voices other than the instructor’s frequently sound in the classroom. Oral pedagogy gives beginning college students practice in reading a range of texts aloud, from published works to their own writings, as well as practice in hearing literary material performed both recorded and live. These multiple voices create audible, reflective thought whereby students can pay attention to the text and to their own reactions and those of their peers. A pedagogy of orality encourages students to become actively involved, socially-integrated learners who know how to reflect on their own learning and how to transform their life experiences into learning experiences (Bleich, 2001; Gardner, 1999). For these reasons, oral communication deserves an elevated place as an educational strategy in higher education.
Oral pedagogy focuses on student voices—in whole-group discussion, small-group informal talk, recitation, and performance—as the central learning events in the classroom and as a means for students to practice high-level acts of attention to texts. Aural and oral learning methods make use of the fact that the ear captures and processes textual nuances that the eye misses. In this way, aural texts address a problem common to many readers in their early college years: lack of close reading skills to explore what a text really says. Training the ear through aural texts supports the kind of sharply focused interpretation that engenders high-level reading and writing capacities.
As a first-year student success strategy at Colorado Mountain College, oral pedagogy attracts and holds fledgling college students. Students encounter texts as live or recorded performance and then discuss and analyze the works together. For example, rather than silently read a Robert Frost poem, students listen to Frost reading his work “The Road Not Taken” at poets.org. The group listens to the poem three times. Following the first hearing, students discuss initial impressions of the poem’s plot, setting, characters, and figurative language. During the second hearing, students jot down key words and strong images that interest them and comment on their increasing understanding of the poem. After the third listening and discussion, students compose a written statement of the meaning or theme of the poem. As audience to a performance, students in turn “perform” as they aurally and orally process their own emerging understanding and build textual analyses from what they hear and talk over with others. Students move from initial, individual reactions to collaborative text analysis, and on to formal writing. This method can be effectively adapted to all genres of texts for literature and composition studies.
Three major learning outcomes arise from the practice of oral pedagogy: (a) multivocality (i.e., multiple literacies and voices in the classroom); (b) aesthetic awareness that fosters critical reading and thinking; and (c) analytic ability. An explanation of each learning outcome suggests how instructors can implement oral and aural learning methods.
Multivocality
Oral pedagogy offers multiple ways for students to master course content. Student responses, comments, and questions constitute elements of instruction, and learners also perform what they know as they acquire new skills and information. In this way, from the beginning of their college careers, students experience the text and their own critical reflections as interrelated acts.
Aesthetic Awareness
Writing students edit each other’s drafts of persuasive essays prior to final revision.
Guided practice in listening to and discussing a wide variety of texts helps students develop sensitivity toward the spoken and written ideas of others. In oral pedagogy, students individually and collectively perform the sequence of academic moves from gut reaction to written essays. Writing and revision, in turn, often require research. Oral pedagogy provides students the opportunity to practice each step and to extend, reflect upon, and evaluate their own learning.
Analytic Ability
Through embodied expression, students construct bridges from their lived experience to scholastic material and on to larger social realities. The sounding of multiple voices in the classroom closes the gap between individual students and between instructors and students. In addition, a major strength of oral pedagogy is that students are at the center of cultural and intellectual experiences and have daily opportunities to describe their reactions and share their responses with other members of the audience. They learn that their ideas matter.
Assessment Practices
Such amplified literacies oblige educators to align learning outcomes, classroom activities, and assessment practices with features of oral pedagogy. The first step is to develop an active, flexible communication style in the classroom, so that discussion, performance, and student talk can transform traditional lectures and other instructor-centered practices into engaging learner-centered processes. The second step is to build a repertoire of measures that assess students’ progressive mastery of new skills.
At Colorado Mountain College, faculty who place oral and aural materials and methods at the center of composition and literature studies have consistently received high student ratings, as reported each semester via Individual Development and Educational Assessments (IDEA). In addition, for the past three academic years (i.e., 2006-2009), the students of these instructors have achieved an 81.6 % success rate, defined as passing English Composition I with a grade of C+ or better. Moreover, students of instructors fully committed to oral pedagogy reached 92.6% retention between fall 2008 and fall 2009, compared to institutional and national retention rates of 70% or lower in classrooms where oral pedagogy is not practiced (Johnson, 2010; Maricopa Community College, 2008). These findings suggest the positive value of oral pedagogy for today’s student.
Conclusion
Aural and oral learning methods bring into play the heightening and brightening of consciousness produced by multiple voices sounding in the classroom. Instructors enlist performance as a teaching and learning technique that encourages students to master college-level reading and writing in a variety of ways. When student voices sound, classrooms become workshops where learners continually practice creating, critiquing, analyzing, and evaluating the social and academic contexts of their lives.
Sound Practices was the topic of Joyce’s presentation at the FYE Conference in Denver last February, attended by several CMC staff and faculty. Joyce welcomes questions, comments, and suggestions about the article, as she continues her research into effective pedagogy for CMC students.
Photos
Used with permission of the author.
Contact
Joyce Devlin Mosher
jmosher@coloradomtn.edu
References
Biggs, J. (1999). Teaching for quality learning at university. Buckingham, UK: OpenUP.
Bleich, D. (2001). The materiality of language and the pedagogy of exchange. Pedagogy, 1, 117-142.
Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence re- framed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. New York, NY: Basic.
Johnson, B. (2010). English completer data (Colorado Mountain College Institutional Research data file). Breckenridge, CO: Colorado Mountain College.
Maricopa Community College. (2008).
Maricopa Community Colleges monitoring update: Indicators of institutional effectiveness (p. 61). Retrieved November 12, 2010, from Maricopa Community College website: http://www.maricopa. edu/gvbd/goals/Monitoring_ Report_2008.pdf
National Council of Teachers of English. (2008a). NCTE position statement: 21st century curriculum and assessment framework. Retrieved July 20, 2010, from NCTE website: http://www.ncte.org/positions/ statements/21stcentframework
National Council of Teachers of English (2008b). NCTE position statement: The NCTE definition of 21st century literacies. Retrieved July 20, 2010, from NCTE website: http://www.ncte.org/positions/ statements/21stcentdefinition
Yancey, K. B. (2009, February). Writing in the 21st century: A report from the National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved from NCTE web- site: http://www.ncte.org/library/ NCTFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf
By Joyce Mosher
