When we set out to teach various kinds of academic writing – research essays, literature reviews, lab reports – we can use the concept of genre to ground our students. It enables them to start, to enter the work of, say, a research essay. They can then use drafting and revising as a way to hone both their skills (defining and presenting their argument, situating it in the context of existing scholarship, marshaling compelling evidence, and so forth) and, thus, their eventual written product. But if we want to help students develop as speakers, what practice do we give them? Expecting students to participate in class discussion by offering incisive comments that “advance” the discussion is a bit like expecting a tightly formulated thesis statement to appear in the first draft of a research essay. It is hard enough to get students to find their own voice in writing, as they attempt to make claims that are both authentically theirs and also have weight in academic discourse. But there’s a double handicap regarding speaking: first,  students get very little practice in it and, second, that practice is not often offered in awareness of, or crafted in reference to, other oral performance, other speech acts. In my experience, students are far more conscious of and discriminating about written genres than oral ones. In this, they unwittingly follow scholars who have only distinguished oral texts from written ones relatively recently. Students’ appreciation of oral art, and how their speech acts – in class, for example – exist on a continuum of other speech acts is consequently muted and is underappreciated for its potential and its importance.

I find it astonishing that I am making this observation now, after more than thirty years of my own scholarly work that has been partially concerned with the residue of oral culture in European society: more evidence, if I needed it, of the unfortunate scholarly habit of imagining research and teaching as separate endeavors.  What do scholarly studies of oral culture tell us that might have a bearing on present-day students’ oral performance? First, scholarship tells us that we are heirs to a diverse and very rich body of oral practice – from traditional tales (with their echoes in well-known children’s stories) to formal speeches to poetry slams – and that, second, we are actually quite skilled at detecting and responding appropriately to different genres of speech.  Students notice the agonistic potential of speech acts, for example, even though they cannot name this quality as such.  In oral cultures, words are always events, never things, as they are when imprisoned on the page, and they carry a special kind of power as a result. The joking banter that greets me when I enter the classroom is a residue of the kind of sometimes-pointed give-and-take that represents the power of speech even in our profoundly literate world.  The banter often continues as a kind of undercurrent in my seminars and I have become attuned to the ways it rises to the point of being glancingly confrontational. It is a calibrated expression of resistance: to confusion, to stress, to arbitrary academic demands. I have learned that it is evidence that I must pay attention to, and I call it also to students’ attention. Your speech has power and it matters – that is one lesson they learn when I pause and make it clear I have listened to them.

In general, the many problems that bedevil faculty when they teach writing in their disciplines are multiplied when teaching oral competencies.  How do we unpack the necessary moves in a piece of scholarly writing for students to practice them? For example, in History, learning how to make productive work of other scholars is more of a dance than anything else: one can use methodologies or questions from one scholar, draw data from someone else’s work and broad context from someone else’s.  These different registers of use, so to speak, require detailed modeling for students. With careful attention, students can learn how to introduce another scholarly voice effectively and generously, but with a light rhetorical touch that leaves plenty of room for her or his original ideas. Students find it easier to master the form of less capacious genres – for example, a book review – but still, they must gain practice in (learn) the form.

How does this kind of coached practice transfer to oral performance in the classroom? First, we must remember that written papers are performances too, in that they are as much events as they are things. That is, they are iterations, always capable of changing (being revised.) Oral performances are even more literally a species of event; they are never things at all, even when recorded, so have different potentials. But what passes for oral performance in most academic settings are performances from an extremely narrow range of genres, most of them tightly text-based. For example, a research presentation (such as I typically assign) is a shortened version of a conference paper.  Introducing one’s research formally, briskly and orally means relying on the kind of analytical distance and techniques of subordination that literacy fosters.  Interventions in a discussion are even more so: tightly composed, thoughtful utterances that reflect deep prior reflection with the aid of texts. This kind of speech requires practice, not merely the reading and reflection that underpin it. It depends on being able to envision the discussion that is unfolding as a text in the literal sense – as strands that offer numerous opportunities to “grab on.”

So, one way we can help our students is to teach them how to use speech to do the “grabbing.” We scholars are so used to exchanging ideas orally that we are often not conscious of the devices we use to initiate it, or the way the contexts we inhabit foster it. In oral performances such as poetry slams and singing tales, there are a variety of devices available to structure the event and claim the audience’s attention. Students in seminars could break into small groups and practice “lead-ins” that claim the floor and enable them to get started. “Lead-ins” are also a way to manage to the time-pressure of oral performance (that literates feel). This is just one suggestion, among many possible ones. The challenge of getting students to bring their best thinking selves to speech, and doing good academic and public work in oral settings, is a challenge of time and attention just as good writing is.

IMAGE CREDIT: Image is licensed under CC0 by 1.0.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kristen Neuschel is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Thompson Writing Program. Most of her published research has focused on aspects of aristocratic life in early modern Europe – on clientage networks, on women and warfare, on oral culture, literacy, and material culture.  She has led research on faculty development and teaching innovation supported by the Spencer and Teagle foundations. In recent years, she has also turned to writing essays, fiction and memoir as well as blogs and tweets to further the conversation about the past in new contexts and for broader audiences.