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This article explores a key question in oracy education: how can schools ensure that oracy frameworks include every student, not just the most fluent speakers? Oracy is the disciplined art of speaking and listening—where thinking, language, expression, and collaboration come together to shape understanding and communication. A narrow focus on fluency in statutory requirements or oracy frameworks can unintentionally exclude students with speech, language and communication needs, autistic spectrum conditions, or those who stammer. This article analyses the 23 teachable practices of Tongue Fu Talking®, showing how each is scaffolded to ensure inclusion. Practices such as expressive eyes and face, rhetorical flair, and managing interactions—often difficult for some learners—are made accessible through sentence stems, multimodal communication, and progression belts. Tongue Fu Talking® provides a structured oracy framework for schools that values reasoning, expression, and collaboration, ensuring all students can become confident and effective communicators.

In many schools, the focus is on creating moments for discussion, usually think–pair–share activities, group work, and whole-class debates. These can be valuable, but on their own, they are like

This article explores 10 classroom talk strategies from Tongue Fu Talking® that build oracy through structured, purposeful dialogue. It explains how approaches like Because, So, But, Connect-It, and Curriculum-Based Debates help students develop reasoning, metacognition, and confident expression, moving beyond superficial talk to meaningful learning across the curriculum.

Curriculum-based debates are a powerful classroom talk strategy, as they require both deep thinking and articulate expression. Within Tongue Fu Talking™, Chris Quigley's Oracy Framework, debates are built around two modes of talk: Explorer Mode–Talk for reasoning, discovery, and collaborative thinking, and Presenter Mode–Talk for structured, confident communication with an audience. These modes ensure that debates are not about winning arguments but about learning through talk, linking oracy directly to disciplinary knowledge and metacognitive strategies. Here, we show how our 480 curriculum-based debates across our four belt levels build both oracy and subject understanding.

This blog explores why a clear oracy framework is essential for learning across all subjects. It explains how classroom talk strategies, such as Because, But, So and Seeking Clues, build both communication skills and disciplinary knowledge in science, geography, and history. The article introduces Tongue Fu Talking™, a structured approach with two strands—Explorer Mode for reasoning and Presenter Mode for confident communication—designed to embed purposeful talk from EYFS to KS3.

In our Complete Guide to Oracy, we outlined how structured talk is essential for learning across all subjects. This article builds on that foundation by examining why oracy is increasingly recognised as vital in education. It draws on findings from parliamentary committees, recent Ofsted reports, and research evidence, all of which highlight a gap in how spoken language is developed and assessed in schools.