Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady was not alone in his exasperation with Eliza’s “Ow” and “Garn” which kept her in her place. The 1921 Newbolt report on the teaching of English cited a catalogue of complaints from employers such as Vickers, Levers and Boots, who reported “great difficulty in obtaining junior clerks who can speak and write English clearly and correctly”; school-leavers were “hopelessly deficient ” in their command of language.

They were referring to young people of 14 or 15. Half a century later, in the late 1980s, the Bullock report stated bleakly that even undergraduates “show an inability to communicate their ideas”. And now, in 2003, the Government finds itself having to issue guidelines to schools to teach primary school children how to speak and — just as important — to listen.

Why can’t the English learn to speak — and why is it important? Being able to use words well is a powerful and liberating weapon. Politicians know better than anyone that using words effectively — to rant, to bellow, to orate — sways electorates, not written manifestos. For everyone, a job interview is the first test of what East Enders used to call “verb”. You need verb to get on. Employers often ignore qualifications and assess interviewees on what they see and hear. Even to vary one’s vocabulary is to stand out from the crowd. Yet painfully little heed has been paid to oral proficiency, as the Government has finally recognised.

One person gnashing her teeth at politicians’ tardiness is the redoubtable Christabel Burniston, who founded the English Speaking Board 50 years ago on Merseyside. Mrs Burniston is now 94, and technically retired, but “I still have the energy to get angry”, she says. She finds it “sickening” that the Department for Education has only just discovered what she put in her manifesto in 1953. “Spoken English is not a subject in the curriculum sense of the word,” she wrote then, “but it is the most important of all educational activities. Oral language is man’s most basic tool, with which he makes friends, earns his living and becomes a participating member of the community.”

The stress had always been on written examinations. But as she said: “There are far more occasions where we have to speak effectively, and listen sincerely, than read or write well. But the first produces the second. The person who has language on the lips will make a better job of writing and, more important, of living.”

Politicians ignored her — possibly associating the notion of speaking well with an elitist view of correct Queen’s English.

But this is not, emphatically not, about elocution. “We do not elocute,” Mrs Burniston has constantly said. “We are not remotely interested in brown cows.” Accents and dialects are celebrated and cherished. The important thing is to sound lively, enthusiastic and engaged, and to speak with clarity and confidence. In the 1980s Mrs Burniston cited the headmistress of a comprehensive school who was so distressed by the arid speech of her pupils that she instructed staff to find a way of examining every subject orally, even maths. After a year, it was found that the spoken English, attitude and behaviour of all pupils had improved dramatically, and they achieved their O level best results.

But Mrs Burniston directed the thrust of her board’s attention towards the non-academic pupils in secondary modern schools, who would leave without any O levels and become hairdressers, receptionists, motor mechanics. In 1981 she drafted her Certificate in Oral Skills, designed to be part of the Youth Training Scheme. The seemingly unemployable would gain confidence if only they were articulate, she reasoned.

Everyone could talk about something: so her examiners would ask pupils to talk about whatever they knew about: a hobby, an experience, a task they could perform. Can you tell me how you shear a sheep? Could you explain how this engine works? Please tell me how you cooked this delicious meal. A 12-year-old girl, educationally backward, once enthralled the examiners with a graphic account of the foster homes she had lived in.

The English Speaking Board’s test also involved reading aloud from a book or newspaper and commenting on it; having a telephone conversation and taking down a message accurately; and a question-and-answer session such as a job interview might entail. These may all sound absurdly basic as “life skills” — but any employer could tell you how rare such fundamental ability is, and all parents note how widespread is the lazy monosyllabic mumble now accepted as teenagerspeak even in the best circles. Universities are now complaining that students schooled on multiple-choice answers are no longer adept at marshalling arguments and reaching logical conclusions in essays. But as Mrs Burniston says, it is through the spoken word, not the written word, that we initially assimilate our thoughts, ideas, opinions, wisdom. “And it is through perceptive listening and courteous speaking that we move towards breaking down social, professional and racial barriers.”

Quite. Most of Mrs Burniston’s board’s work is now carried out among asylum seekers, special needs pupils, and prison inmates. The prospects for employment and a happy life for all these groups improve if they are articulate. It enfranchises them. English is one of the world’s great growth industries, the global common language, spoken and understood by 1.5 billion people. It has become a cliché to observe how much more articulately Americans and Australians use our national asset. How tragic that those born into the privilege of English as a mother tongue have paid so little attention to its effective use.