Spoken Language Controlled Assessment 2027 - Environmental Speeches

Environmental Speeches: Spoken Language Comparison Pack

This comprehensive resource pack is designed for CCEA English teachers to help students explore the mechanics of spoken language through three high-profile environmental speeches: David Attenborough’s COP26 address, Greta Thunberg’s UN Climate Action Summit speech, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s UN Climate Summit address.

The materials focus on helping pupils identify and compare prosodic, linguistic, and contextual features, moving beyond what is said to how it is said and why. Teachers choose which two speeches they want to use.

What’s Included:

• Detailed Transcripts & Analysis: Complete transcripts for all three speeches.Each transcript is paired with a detailed analysis table that breaks down specific quotes by literary devices, prosodic features (such as pitch, volume and intonation), and their intended effect on the audience.
• Contextual Profiles: Ready-to-use worksheets for students to research and record the backgrounds of each speaker. These profiles encourage pupils to consider how a speaker’s profession, age, and experience influence their authority and speech style.
• Prosodic Features Bingo: An interactive activity to help students identify spoken language features—such as fillers, false starts, hedges, and repair - while listening to live audio or video.
• Linguistic Comparison Starters: A series of structured starter sentences designed to help pupils draw direct comparisons between the speakers. These cover narrative structure, the use of data, and the varying tones ranging from Attenborough’s "desperate hope" to Thunberg’s "righteous anger".
• Teacher Presentation Slides: A clean, visual slide deck to guide the lesson, introducing concepts like "Received Pronuciation" versus the "non-fluency features".

Key Learning Objectives:

• Identify the difference between written and spoken language properties, such as metaphor and non-fluency features
• Analyse how prosodic features (tempo, rhythm, and stress) create emotional resonance
• Evaluate how context and audience shape a speaker's rhetorical choices

This pack provides all the scaffolding necessary for students to produce high-quality comparative analyses.