The viewing task used for this analysis required students to select from a visual array two photographs that they considered particularly suitable for a poster to promote reading. Having made their initial selections, students were asked to defend their choices. Students were subsequently asked to identify the picture they considered least suitable for their poster, and to say why. Although this task provided students with the opportunity to share responses, talk about and clarify ideas, relate their chosen pictures to other pictures or to their personal experience, and to critique the picture they thought least suitable, relatively few students at either Year 4 or Year 8 fully exploited these opportunities.

Although this task was open-ended and did not require prior knowledge, some students were quite unforthcoming in their responses: they appeared not to relish the opportunity to enlarge on their ideas and appeared keen to get the task done with a minimum of cognitive or vocal effort. As was discussed in Section 2, students' overall ability to provide full and well-developed oral justifications in support of a point of view was found to be weak at both year levels. The following discussion examines some of the structures and strategies that students employed in their speech during this task.

(a) Oral Justifications
While it might reasonably be expected that oral language performance would become increasingly fluent, confident and sustained as students advance towards secondary school, the statistical evidence gathered in this study does not support this assumption. Neither Year 4 nor Year 8 students showed themselves to be strong or fluent in justifying a point of view. Although students at both year levels could give at least one reason to explain their selections, less than a quarter of students at either year level elaborated extensively on their ideas. Still fewer were able to unpack their selection strategies in terms of the underlying messages they inferred from the pictures, or in terms of the cognitive moves they had made in order to make their selections. Less than a quarter of students at either year level articulated full and well-developed justifications for their selections. Many students responded to questions at only a surface level. They tended to make utterances that were merely descriptions of what they could see before them. When asked to explain or justify their picture selections, these students did not actively seek to extend or elaborate their ideas at all.

These findings are in line with NEMP Forum comment summaries of student oral performance in viewing tasks for both 1999 and 2003:

Teacher Administrator: “Can you tell me why you chose this picture?”
P051 A1 [Picture 1] “Because the man is teaching the kids to read and he's got the full alphabet there and they're all reading along with him…cos all of the kids are watching him and they've all got books and it looks as if they're having fun looking at the picture and reading along… .” [Picture 2] “Cos that's got the book for a frame and these people are reading books and the boy's looking at the girl's book as if he's thinking 'oh, I wish I had that book!'” (Year 4)

M081 A1 “Cos this one's got three kids or a class reading and they've all got their heads down…seem to be enjoying it...[Picture 2] and this one…the guy, the boy's obviously enjoying it…like he really likes the book…he's smiling. You can tell by his eyes.” (Year 8)
[NOTE: This student also adjusts his register (from “guy” to “boy”) which he judges will suit the semi-formal rather than conversational context of this situation.]

“I chose that one there cos the girl looks like she's enjoying reading…found an interesting story that she'd like to read and I chose that one there because the little boy is reading to his grandmother.” (Year 8)

“Cos the glow of the book makes it seem like it's magical. They escape to this different world with all different characters and seem to be having a good time.” (Year 8)

“I chose this one because these people are young readers. They're not big and old like this person.” (Year 4)
“I chose that one there like because the book's shiny and it makes it like it could take children on a magical journey. I chose that one there because the girl is smiling. She's looking somewhere else rather than looking at the book.” (Year 8)

This last example also shows evidence, through the linked clauses, of the speaker linking and developing ideas in the very process of articulating them. This teasing out of ideas is a strategy that seems perhaps more reminiscent of the construction of an argument in writing than of spontaneous conversational speech.

Not all students who spoke in complete sentences achieved a formal and effective delivery. However. Some students who spoke in completed sentences appeared nevertheless very unconfident in their delivery. They spoke in a very punctuated fashion and their delivery was judged to be very halting. The following example is from a student whose speech delivery was reminiscent of a hesitant reader struggling to decode text:

(e) The Dynamics of Oral Responses
Teacher-administrator influence appeared to be highly influential in affecting students' oral responses during this task. This impact appeared greater for those students who did not display confidence during this task and who sometimes appeared to infer from the prompts they were given, that they were not at all on the right track in their responses. Some students may also have been slightly confused by the use of the negative in the wording of the third question in this task. Task Administrators sometimes muddled the question ”Which picture would you not choose?” into “Now choose the picture you would not choose” or “Which one would you choose that you wouldn't use for your poster?”.

However fully or briefly students had responded to the first two questions in this task, the justification they offered for their third choice was almost invariably the same length or briefer than their first two had been. It was unclear why students almost always spoke less in defence of their third selection. Perhaps they associated the notion of “giving reasons for” with the defence of a positive choice. Therefore they interpreted the request to explain their reasons for not choosing a particular picture as only requiring a brief closed statement or a dismissive explanation. Another explanation to account for the typically terse third answer might lie in the manner of the Teacher Administrator. At this point in the task, many Teacher Administrators indicated to the student that they were almost done, and most appeared satisfied with a brief response from the student even if earlier in the task they had encouraged the student to enlarge or elaborate on their ideas. Perhaps the Teacher Administrators themselves associated the negative question with a brief, closed response. If so, it is possible that this reflects a wider phenomenon among teachers to head off the demands of “getting through” material by various strategies of efficiency, at the expense of allowing particular students the time to explore issues in detail:

Summary
Substantial variations in oral language performance were observed across the students in the sample. Good oral language speakers used a range of strategies to sustain conversation. They used coordinating conjunctions, to link ideas, offered additional or connected comments, and posed veiled questions, in order to maintain the conversation. Poor speakers offered fewer reasons, sustained them for less time, and had more temporal delays in their responses. Some students appeared to have a poor command of oral language and lacked the ability to use oral language effectively to convey and clarify meaning. For some students, simply being asked to engage in talk and defend a point of view appeared challenging enough. By contrast, good speakers tended to use speech for thought rather than simply for identifying and describing. These speakers sometimes introduced ideas by using cognitive verbs like “wonder”, “think”, “guess” “suppose”, believe”. They sometimes used narrative strategies to frame their ideas.

Overall, students' oral language performance indicated a need for speakers to organise beforehand what they had to say, and to work harder to find ways of expressing and developing their ideas. For example, few students summarised the purpose of their task selections or enumerated their reasons for selection. Having a sense of the audience, and shaping their words and thoughts with a sense of an overall purpose in defending a point of view were skills that appeared weak, particularly among the Year 8 students. Enthusiasm and eagerness to engage in purposeful discussion in this task appeared more evident among the Year 4 students.

Although it is generally claimed that children learn “spoken” language more naturally than they learn reading and writing, this study reinforces the importance of oral language skill development. Whereas confident speakers are likely to speak more, and more precisely, and thereby develop their oral language skills and expand their fluency generally, those students who struggle to speak and who experience difficulty giving voice to their ideas are also likely to speak less and consequently to have less practice and less opportunity to develop as speakers, so that with time the gap between good and poor oral language users must surely widen.