A speaking club at school

The case for thinking out loud

Abstract

The speaking and listening, despite being an integral part of the curriculum, continue to occupy a secondary place in school practices, often limited to formal assessments. This article proposes the creation of an oral skills club as a strategy to promote the systematic teaching of oral expression in real-world and engaging contexts. Based on a theoretical framework that identifies the constitutive planes of oral skills—linguistic, paralinguistic, and kinesic—and their teachable dimensions, the Pensar Alto (thinking out loud) club 's educational journey, developed over the course of a school year, is presented. This article describes a concrete pedagogical experience, structured in phases: initial assessment, development of specific skills, preparation of presentations, and holding a public event in the TEDx format.