We are no longer speaking to express, we are speaking to impress
There is a widespread belief in society that it is good for us to be able to express and present ourselves through speeches both to our peers and to a formal audience. And yet many of us fear speaking in public more than we do dying. Evidently a most severe type of performance anxiety accompanies speaking in public.
Alongside this, there has been an observable decline in the oral language expression of younger children, which many attribute to a decrease in adult role modelling, together with the humungous increase in screen time and its bastardising of language quality. And yet to address this decline, we are compensating with an increase in formal language presentation skills and particularly speech competitions, enforcing the very thing that many of us fear the most – public speaking and being judged to a formula by others.
This manner of speaking imposes very rigid formulae on children’s speech rather than the natural rich expression that could be there under different circumstances. Are we now teaching our children not to express, but to impress others?
From personal observation, in a supportive classroom environment, when children are offered a number of topics to explore, they work with this opportunity and see it as a positive challenge taking evident enjoyment in expressing their unique perspective on their chosen subject matter. In this safe and familiar environment with their teacher and their friends they usually express with a natural humour and authority, with little to no performance anxiety.
Their expression changes markedly when the oral presentation becomes one of competition and competing against their peers from other schools.
Pushing children into the next level of public speaking competitions however, compromises their expression to meet the competitive criteria, as well as adding the pressure of public performance. Children literally become puppets of these externally imposed speech criteria, rehearsing their speech repeatedly to ensure they stay within the two-minute time limit.
Within this context of public speaking competitions there are many factors that contribute to the undermining of children’s true and natural expression. The speeches are held in contrived situations where the roles are those of competitor and expert judge. These competitive situations are governed solely on the basis of the deemed criteria of success which include: a fixed posture, a standard way of standing with the chest out and hands by their sides. The children are then told to look ‘natural and relaxed’! They are told where to and when to look at their audience and how to move across the stage. They are told to use hand gestures throughout and to gesture emphatically to make an important point in their speech. These severe gestures impose a sense of dogmatism over the top of the original speech. They are harsh on the physical body and equally as harsh to observe.
Most assuredly this is not the children’s natural way of communicating and expressing.
Moreover, the children are no longer expressing for themselves; they are now carrying the pressure of representing the school. What was once a true expression has now become a contrived speech that is aiming to win and be judged as the best.
In these situations, a child’s body becomes adrenalised and their nervous energy escalates, opening the door to severe performance anxiety. It is here that we see the erosion of children’s enjoyment in using oral language to express for themselves.
The winner gets the reward and the accolade of being the best, whilst the losers experience profound disappointment. However, for both the winners and the losers their natural expression has been bastardised by such experiences that are promoted within the education system as being ‘good for’ children.
Are we not simply teaching children to impress others in the context of a fixed and narrow set of criteria at the expense of their own enjoyment?
Does placing children into the situation where they and we educators reduce the value of their expression to the outcome of a timed two-minute contrived presentation truly support them? Are we robbing our children of their innate expression to connect with each other and express from their bodies in a natural and joyful way, which will be with them for their entire lives?
Should we not be addressing the real underlying causes of children’s declining oral language skills rather than sabotaging their expression further by putting them into these formal public speaking competitions?