Oral language has primacy both developmentally and by virtue of use for most individuals in our society; however, the development of oral language for many children is left to chance. Although English education journals have resounded with exhortations to teachers about the importance of encouraging children to talk, the recent limited research suggests strongly that speaking and listening activities in Years 7-l0 classes have very low profile by comparison with the amount of time devoted to reading and writing activities, at least in Australia. One macro-level speech community which cuts across age, sex, and social class boundaries in Australia is sports, and an examination of the speech community inhabited by sporting "heroes" reveals the nature of the role models for young people's oral language. A study of 15 hours of video tape interviews with sports heroes yields four major classifications (expressive moments, self-reflection, decision-making considerations, and outer-directed analyses) which account for virtually all the utterances apart from social banalities and chitchat revealing startling limitations of self-observation, analysis and reflection. These interviews not only provide a model for sporting fans--of whom children and adolescents form a substantial group--they also provide a data base for the study of the products of the English education of the seventies and eighties, presenting evidence to support the need for constructive direction from curriculum designers and researchers. (A list of 15 references is appended.) (NH)