Critical Speaking: Higher Ed's Missing Literacy
Are your students ready to add value to the real world?
After nearly twelve years teaching in higher education classrooms, I have noticed a growing gap that rarely gets named. Colleges place tremendous emphasis on writing and test taking, yet far less attention is given to students’ ability to organize their thoughts and speak cogently about what they know.
This matters, especially in discussion based and Socratic classrooms where learning depends on verbal exchange. Increasingly, students arrive with thoughtful ideas but struggle to articulate them aloud with clarity and confidence. Since Covid, this shift has become even more pronounced. What I see is not a lack of thinking, but a lack of support for what I have come to call critical speaking.
“Critical Speaking”
By critical speaking, I do not mean simply talking more or feeling comfortable speaking in front of others. I see it as closely tied to self confidence and self efficacy, particularly students’ belief that their ideas are worth articulating and can be communicated clearly.
Critical speaking is the ability to think in and through speech, to articulate ideas with purpose, ground claims in evidence or experience, consider one’s audience, and reflect on how words are shaping meaning in real time. It requires organization, intentionality, and self awareness, especially when ideas are still forming.
In my teacher preparation courses, students now rarely speak unless participation is heavily incentivized, and some even resist small group activities that require collaborative discussion. Unlike writing, spoken language does not allow endless revision, yet it often carries greater academic and social consequence, which helps explain why many students avoid it altogether.
Traditional approach.
Traditional speech or communications courses, when they are required at all, tend to prepare students for highly structured, formal presentations, often centered on slide decks and rehearsed delivery. While these skills have value, they rarely address the kind of impromptu, dialogic speaking that dominates college classrooms and professional settings.
Students learn how to present, but not how to think aloud, respond in the moment, or build on others’ ideas during discussion. As a result, many preservice teachers complete a single communications course believing they are done learning how to speak, even though they remain deeply uncomfortable contributing verbally without preparation or script.
Higher education would claim that critical thinking is regularly taught, named and assessed. However, recent research by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) shows that nearly 50% of all college graduates are not proficient in critical thinking. As such, either it’s not being regularly taught, named and assessed, or, if it is being taught, it’s not being taught well.
As with critical thinking, it’s more likely that higher education assumes that critical speaking will develop on its own. When it does not, students are frequently misread as unprepared, disengaged, or lacking insight. In reality, many students have never been taught how to listen to their own thinking aloud, refine it through practice, or claim space in academic conversations.
Treating critical speaking as a core literacy rather than a personality trait or soft skill fundamentally changes how we teach, assess, and support student voice.
Impact on students.
Higher education has also quietly moved away from spoken academic discourse. Long before Covid, writing intensive assignments and discussion boards began replacing sustained verbal dialogue. During and after the pandemic, this shift accelerated. Students became accustomed to muted microphones, cameras off, and asynchronous participation. While these structures offered necessary flexibility, they also reduced opportunities for students to practice organizing and expressing ideas aloud in real time.
The result is not student apathy, but student hesitation. Many learners now enter classrooms unsure how to enter a discussion, respond spontaneously, or sustain an idea once they begin speaking.
This challenge is especially pronounced for first generation college students, who may already feel uncertain about academic norms and expectations. When spoken participation is treated as optional or assumed, students who most need structured support for critical speaking are often the first to withdraw. What appears to be disengagement is frequently a lack of guided practice in verbal reasoning.
I offer these observations not as a sweeping generalization, but as a practitioner reflecting on patterns I have witnessed across multiple institutional contexts.
Over the past twelve years, I have taught at three distinct institutions, a large R1 state university, a small HBCU, and a mid sized regional university, each located in different parts of Appalachia. Despite their differences in size, mission, and student population, I have seen the same pattern emerge. Students are expected to speak critically long before they are ever taught how. This consistency across settings suggests that the absence of intentional instruction in critical speaking is not isolated, but systemic.
My concern about critical speaking has been shaped especially by my work with first generation college students in the Appalachian region, including remote areas of southern West Virginia such as McDowell County. Many of these students are thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply reflective, yet they have had limited opportunities to examine how their spoken language functions in academic and professional spaces. Colloquialisms, regional speech patterns, and informal structures are a natural part of their linguistic identity, but these features are rarely discussed explicitly in college classrooms.
As a result, students often internalize the idea that their difficulty speaking in class reflects a personal or intellectual shortcoming. In reality, they have simply never been invited to listen to themselves, analyze their speech, or practice shaping ideas for different audiences.
This is not a deficit in thinking. It is a lack of access to the hidden curriculum of academic discourse. When higher education fails to teach critical speaking intentionally, it disproportionately silences students whose voices already sit at the margins.
Simple tools can help.
I discovered Vocaroo.com about seven years ago while searching for tools to strengthen my own presence in online forums. I was struck by how something as simple as listening to my own recorded voice changed my awareness of pacing, clarity, and organization. That insight quickly translated into my teaching. Vocaroo’s strength lies in its simplicity. It is free, requires no account, and removes many of the barriers that make speaking practice feel performative or high stakes.
I began using it with students as a low pressure way to respond verbally to guiding questions, reflect on course content, and practice organizing ideas aloud. Students record short responses, listen back to themselves, and often notice patterns they had never considered, unfinished thoughts, reliance on fillers, or frequent colloquialisms that obscure meaning.
For many first generation students in rural Appalachian contexts, this act of self listening is transformative. They frequently report surprise at how their ideas sound and relief at realizing that clarity is a skill that can be practiced rather than an innate trait.
Over time, I have seen this kind of structured, low pressure audio practice change how first generation students approach speaking altogether. By listening back to their own recordings, students are able to study their verbal communication objectively rather than emotionally. They notice where their attention drifts, where ideas become unfocused, or where clarity breaks down.
This awareness allows them to make small, intentional adjustments in pacing, organization, and emphasis. As their control over attention and verbal structure improves, so does their willingness to participate. Students who once avoided discussion begin to contribute more consistently, not because they have been told to speak more, but because they trust their ability to sustain an idea aloud.
And so . . .
If higher education truly values critical thinking, it must also value the ways thinking is expressed aloud. Speaking is not an optional add on to learning, nor is it a personality trait reserved for the confident or extroverted. It is a literacy that can be taught, practiced, and refined.
Re-centering spoken thought requires intentional instructional choices and tools that allow students to hear and reflect on their own voices. By restoring critical speaking to its rightful place in higher education, we strengthen not only individual voices, but the collective intellectual life of our classrooms.
About the Author
Dr. Amanda Banks is a teacher educator with experience teaching across a range of higher education institutions, including a nationally renowned R1 university, a small HBCU, and a regional university. Her work focuses on equity centered pedagogy, teacher preparation, and supporting first generation students in rural and Appalachian contexts. She is particularly interested in how spoken language shapes access, confidence, and professional voice in academic spaces.
If you are an educator experimenting with ways to support student voice, discussion, or spoken reasoning in your classroom, she invites you to consider how critical speaking is, or is not, being taught where you work. She may be contacted at abloomfieldbanks@gmail.com. or contacting The Carnegie Academy at rcapehart@carnegieacademy.org.