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: Making Partner Talk Purposeful: A Classroom Journey into Oracy and Metacognition Dave Seneviratne discusses the challenge of ensuring talk is purposeful and how he has tackled this in his classroom.

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Making Partner Talk Purposeful: A Classroom Journey into Oracy and Metacognition

Dave Seneviratne discusses the challenge of ensuring talk is purposeful and how he has tackled this in his classroom.

Dave

Dave Seneviratne

Year 2 Teacher and ELE at Alexandra Park Primary School and Research School

To find out more about Dave, please click here

Read more aboutDave Seneviratne
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Rethinking Partner Talk: From Routine to Purpose

How many times a day does a teacher ask children to talk to your partner”? It’s a well-established classroom strategy — a bridge between teacher modelling and independent work. I use it in almost every lesson. But over time, I began to question its impact.

How much of that talk is actually purposeful? Is it reinforcing learning — or simply a distraction, as children drift into idle chat? How do we move beyond surface-level talk and support pupils to use talk as a tool for deeper thinking?

Connecting Oracy with Metacognition: What the Evidence Says


A whole-school priority at Alexandra Park is oracy, aiming to explicitly teach the skills of good quality speaking and listening. Building on this, I considered how talk could support metacognition and was led to evidence from the EEF’s guidance reports, particularly:

- Improving Literacy in KS1(Recommendation 1): Develop pupils’ speaking and listening skills to build a foundation for reading and writing.

- Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning (Recommendation 5): Purposeful dialogue can support both cognition and metacognition — if it’s well-structured and intentional.

With this in mind, I set out to make partner talk more purposeful. I focused on three key strategies:

1. Design structured, purposeful tasks with clear roles for each child.
2. Provide sentence stems and key vocabulary to scaffold responses.
3. Model effective partner talk and give regular feedback on the quality of dialogue.

Starting with Maths: A Shift in Lesson Structure


I chose maths as my starting point, where children often rush to answers without explaining their thinking. I wanted to slow down the process and use talk to help children focus on reasoning and problem-solving.

Following the teacher input, children spent most of the rest of the lesson working in carefully chosen pairs. Each child had a defined role:

- Partner A 
explained the steps or their reasoning.
- Partner B
recorded the process — drawing diagrams, using manipulatives, writing calculations and the answer.

Following each question, they switched roles.

Modelling Talk and Celebrating Dialogue


Before beginning, I modelled what effective talk looked and sounded like. I played the part of Partner A, using the sentence stems and vocabulary displayed on the board. Once they were working in pairs, I monitored their talk, offered feedback, and celebrated examples of high-quality dialogue.

At first, I realised many conversations were still quite limited:

A
I think the answer is 17.”
B
Yes I agree.”

This led me to refine the sentence stems and re-model expectations. Gradually, I began to see more metacognitive dialogue, such as:

A
I think the answer is 13 because… Hang on, no it can’t be that. It must be 14 because if I move 2 over to make 10, I have 4 left over.”

This kind of talk showed children monitoring and adjusting their thinking — a key element of metacognition.

Here is an example of the sentence stems I displayed to scaffold purposeful talk:

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Next Steps: Partner Talk in Reading

I’m still learning how to make the most of pupils working collaboratively. The next area I wish to explore is reading — particularly how we can improve the support children give each other during paired reading.

Too often I hear children ignoring their partner’s mistakes or correcting them too quickly instead of prompting them to monitor for themselves.

Final Reflections: Purposeful Talk Needs Purposeful Teaching


Purposeful talk doesn’t happen by chance. It requires planning, modelling, and consistent feedback. But when children begin to take ownership of their dialogue, it has the potential to transform both understanding and engagement.

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