6: Academic Talk Teaching Practices in An Australian Academic Preparation Context

As we established in Chapter 5, educators and students based in the academic preparation context of Enabling Education (EE) programmes clearly see academic oracy/talk as being important for preparing students for undergraduate study. This chapter will turn to a new question about how academic talk is practised by these educators, exploring what kinds of talk are taught and privileged in EE.

Despite clear disparity in awareness and understanding of academic oracy, our participants described varying applications of talk, suggesting that some Enabling educators intuitively use talk in their teaching. Much of the discussion about using talk was centred around a perceived need to develop safe and comfortable spaces for students to be able to share ideas and make sense. This demanded a disruption of hierarchical power dynamics, as Angel described: