Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Oracy is a hot topic in England's education landscape, increasingly deployed as part of a bipartisan theory of social justice which claims that improved abilities in spoken language can afford working-class and racialised children a route out of the economic and racial inequalities they experience. In this article, I reject these logics, making two main arguments. First, I examine the language ideological foundations of how oracy was first theorised in 1960s' academic scholarship, showing how it was informed by a flawed theory of language rooted in deficit and dichotomous framings which essentialised working-class, disabled, and racialised children as producing less legitimate language than their wealthier, able-bodied, and white peers. Second, I show how the contemporary oracy agenda relies on a flawed theory of change in its assumptions that social justice can be unlocked by marginalised children making tweaks to their language. I argue that this theory of change frames social justice as a matter of individualised remediation and thus obscures the structural dimensions of inequality. I show how these logics are embedded in purportedly progressive academic scholarship and guises of charitable benevolence. I call for new visions of language education rooted in radical, transformative justice.