Oracy and place-based approaches to geography teaching in multilingual contexts: the South African case

Geography education requires learners to interpret spatial relationships and connect global concepts to their lived environments. A critical pedagogy of place highlights these links by situating knowledge within cultural and ecological contexts. Within this approach, oracy – the ability to reason through talk – becomes central to enquiry. Dialogue enables learners to co-construct understanding and express place-based experiences. In South African schools, many learners primarily engage with geography through English or Afrikaans instead of their home languages, creating linguistic and cultural gaps that limit participation and conceptual depth. This paper argues that the Oracy Framework can strengthen communicative competence when aligned with pedagogies responsive to learners’ linguistic and local realities. Drawing on case studies from three South African schools, it shows how grounding oracy in place-based enquiries improves understanding. Such an approach positions geography classrooms as dialogic spaces where language, identity and environment intersect to support more equitable learning.