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Oracy strategies for more able pupils must go beyond giving them a platform to talk. High attaining students need structured opportunities to develop advanced vocabulary, practise metacognitive strategies, and engage in exploratory reasoning. This blog explores how Tongue Fu Talking® provides a progressive framework to ensure more able learners thrive in both Explorer Mode and Presenter Mode, moving beyond surface eloquence towards clarity, substance and collaborative thinking.

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 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.

This blog introduces Tongue Fu Talking™, a structured oracy framework for EYFS to KS3. It explains why oracy is essential for speaking and listening progression, and how teachers can embed it across the curriculum using two modes of talk: Explorer Mode (for reasoning and discussion) and Presenter Mode (for performance and persuasion). The framework’s 23 teachable oracy skills are organised into four disciplines—The Stance, The Flow, The Mind and The Bond—supported by a clear, motivating belt system. With links to oracy CPD, sentence stems, and classroom resources, this is your complete guide to teaching talk with clarity and confidence.