‘Oral essay’. Reflections on the relevance and possibilities of spontaneous oral academic monologue as a higher education study practice.

In this paper I focus on oracy in the context of UK higher education, outlining some of the past and present discussions surrounding its status and significance. I present the initial conceptualisation of an alternative study practice – ‘oral essay’, aimed at developing students’ skills of spontaneous monological speaking. I believe that such task can exemplify oracy for learning, for meaning-making, for grappling with disciplinary knowledge – the aspects of oracy that, as literature suggests, often tend to be overlooked in the existing educational practices. ‘Oral essay’, I argue, could also offer an alternative to PowerPoint-assisted oral assignments where the speech tends to be pre-rehearsed or even memorised in advance, offering only a finished product for evaluation and not probing into students’ abilities to engage in live construction of ideas. I present early findings of a small-scale exploratory pilot study, conducted as part of a larger Design-Based Research project, and briefly discuss potential implications for further theoretical conceptualisation of the ‘oral essay’ and design decisions (both substantive and procedural) for oral essay tasks.