This essay takes as its starting-point the recent announcement that GCSE English, the high-stakes test taken by 16-year-olds in England, will no longer include the assessment of speaking and listening. It attempts to place this decision, and other recent policy interventions that will have an impact on how talk in the classroom is conceptualised and valued, in a longer history of schooling, attitudes to spoken English and the notion of a spoken standard. The essay then explores, through an account of an observed GCSE English lesson, something of the complexities involved in taking talk, and the assessment of talk, seriously.