Why Schools Need to Do a Better Job of Teaching Speaking Skills

—Image adapted from "mic" by Flickr user Robert Bejil, under Creative Commons

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I got an email last week from a student who was in my class eight years ago. She had to do a presentation to complete her master’s degree, and the professor had warned the students that no one ever gets an A grade. Paige got an A+. She was emailing me to credit me for her success and thank me for teaching her a life-long valuable skill. She thanked me for teaching her how to be well-spoken.

Every one of us has heard some adult say, “I wish I could speak better” or “I don’t like presenting” or “I’m not really good at talking to groups” or something similar. None of us has ever heard an adult say, “I wish I had been taught more about iambic pentameter” or “I feel bad that I don’t remember much about the quadratic formula/mitosis/the bourgeois monarchy.” That contrast should tip us off to a problem in education. We may be focusing on things that are less important in life at the expense of something that matters a lot: speaking.

Let’s look numerically at how we fail to value oral language in schools. Consider the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts. They are divided into four areas: reading; writing; speaking and listening; and literacy. Why are speaking and listening crammed together? Why not five standards? Listening and speaking make up as much as75 percent of adult communication, yet represent just 25 percent of the standards.

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