Critical thinking, oral language, and embodiment in the primary classroom: a critical thematic literature review

Abstract This article presents a critical thematic literature review examining how contemporary Western research conceptualises the intersections of oracy, embodiment, power relations, oral literacies, and critical thinking in primary literacy education. Analysing peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025, and informed by longstanding Australian and international scholarship, the review identifies four major themes concerning the role of oral language and talk in literacy learning: dialogic teaching and classroom talk; critical literacy and power relations; twenty-first-century skills and educational policy; and embodied learning and multimodal literacies. A central finding is a persistent tendency to marginalise the body-in-context within dominant conceptions of oral literacy, with talk commonly framed as primarily cognitive, linguistic, or skill-based rather than embodied, relational, and situated. Drawing on the concept of participatory sense-making proposed by De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), we argue that although policy and research frequently position oracy and critical thinking as essential twenty-first-century capabilities, they rarely account for how these practices are lived, enacted, and negotiated through bodies, identities, and relations of power. The review further suggests that oral language and critical thinking should be understood as forms of embodied identity work involving agency, inclusion, cultural positioning, and material contexts. An important implication is the need to design primary classroom practices that explicitly integrate embodiment, place, and materiality as foundations for developing students’ enactive and critical capacities. Such approaches may include a broad repertoire of formal and informal oral modalities, including storying, reading aloud, active listening, reflecting, group talk, text talk, debating, thinking aloud, drama, and movement. These practices are most powerful when grounded in dialogic processes, presentations, and sustained group interaction.