Academic oracy has gained increased attention in recent years as fields such as developmental psychology, linguistics, and education, “have emphasised the importance of talk (…) and its use as both a cognitive and social tool for learning and social engagement” (Mercer et al., 2017: 51). An outcome of this growing interest is a shift towards more active learning approaches, which place demands on students in terms of speaking (Doherty et al., 2011). Studies have identified different aspects of those changes, such as lectures becoming more interactive (Roberts, 2017), seminars requiring higher levels of verbal participation (Engin, 2017), and the fact that there is often some type of assessment of oral skills (Huxham et al., 2012), which may come in the form of assessment to oral presentations (Bhati, 2012).

Research on oracy has been conducted in compulsory education (primary and secondary), notably in the UK (Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer & Mannion, 2018; Michaels, et al., 2008; Alexander, 2008; Jay et al., 2017), but also in Australia (Stinson, 2015) and in other countries (Howe, 2017), which establishes a strong relationship between teaching of oracy and improved academic achievement (Heron et al., 2022). While there has been some documented transfer to higher education settings (Doherty et al. 2011; Kettle & May, 2012; Dippold et al., 2019; Heron, 2019), not enough is known about the role and function of oracy in higher education contexts, whether in Australia or internationally.

As part of my PhD research, I have been examining the ways in which curricula in three disciplinary areas at an Australian university construct and implement oracy development in and through learning and teaching and its relationship to broader issues of employability and skills. That has been done through critical analysis of relevant documentation, interviews with students and lecturers, and classroom observation.

When the conference takes place in August 2023, I will have conducted two of the three case studies of my research, so will be able to share the initial findings with the community. Having been a researcher and an undergraduate, Master’s and now PhD student in institutions across the Americas, Europe and now Australia, I understand that the concern around students’ academic oracy as a tool for learning is key to students’ experiences of higher education.

My study takes an ethnographically-oriented (Geertz, 1973), case study approach (Stake, 1995), which includes class observations and interviews. This methodology is appropriate because it will provide rich contextualised understandings of national guidelines and university documents and practices related to oracy in undergraduate courses at UNSW. To analyse the class observation and semi-structured interview data, I will use reflexive thematic analysis and follow its six-phase approach (Braun et al., 2019; Braun & Clark, 2022).

As little is known about universities and educators’ understandings as well as students’ experiences related to oracy, my research aims to make an original contribution to knowledge in the field of academic oracy, which remains underexplored in higher education in Australia and globally.

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