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How Tongue Fu Talking® orchestrates attention through oracy
This article explores how oracy transforms classroom attention from passive to purposeful. It shows how Tongue Fu Talking® resources help teachers cue, sustain, and make focus visible across The Stance, The Flow, The Mind, and The Bond, ensuring attention drives meaningful learning.
1. Cueing attention with The Stance
Gestures, posture, tone, and facial expression act as attentional signals. Tongue Fu Talking® makes these visible by teaching students how to project, pause, and signal meaning. Attention becomes a shared responsibility: not just a teacher’s demand but a communicative practice.
2. Sustaining attention with The Flow
Explorer Mode routines such as Because–So–But discussions, curriculum-based debates, and sentence stems keep thinking moving forward. The Flow disciplines—vocabulary, register, sentence structure, rhetorical flair—anchor talk in purpose. This reduces drift by ensuring attention is channelled into precise disciplinary reasoning.
3. Making attention visible through The Mind
Because attention is invisible, teachers need students to show the thinking. Oracy practices like reasoning with justification, summarising, and metacognition turn hidden focus into audible evidence. When students articulate why something is true, what follows from it, and where exceptions may lie, attention becomes both visible and inspectable.
4. Building habits of attention via The Bond
Attention is social as well as individual. The Bond disciplines—turn-taking, audience awareness, engagement, and collaboration—establish habits like tracking the speaker and acknowledging peers. These shared norms stabilise collective focus, ensuring that attention circulates across the classroom rather than pooling with a few voices.
Purposeful attention in practice
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Mini-explanations with stance cues: deliberate pauses, gestural emphasis, and clear signposting hold collective focus on key points.
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Because–So–But routines: students externalise justification, consequences, and constraints, making attention visible through structured oracy.
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Debates with clear stages: opening statements, evidence, counterarguments, and rebuttals focus attention on disciplinary claims while sustaining shared engagement.
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Presenter Mode activities: audiences practise tracking, summarising, and questioning, so that attention is not just received but enacted.
Common practice reframed through oracy
Traditional routines like “3-2-1 eyes on me” or posture-based strategies such as S.L.A.N.T manage behaviour but do not guarantee cognitive focus. Tongue Fu Talking® reframes attention: the goal is not compliance but purposeful oracy. When students are reasoning, questioning, and presenting within structured talk, attention is not only maintained but channelled into learning.
Oracy and Inclusion
Attentional scaffolds are especially valuable for students with weaker self-regulation or lower working-memory capacity. Structured oracy practices reduce extraneous load and provide predictable ways to contribute. This levels the playing field, enabling all learners to focus on core ideas and disciplinary reasoning (Gathercole and Alloway, 2008).
Key takeaways
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Oracy transforms attention from passive to purposeful by making thinking audible.
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Tongue Fu Talking® resources help teachers cue, sustain, and share attention across The Stance, The Flow, The Mind, and The Bond.
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Structured oracy routines reduce distraction, make attention visible, and support equity.
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Attention is the currency of learning: oracy ensures it is spent where it matters most.
FAQs
What is oracy and why does it matter for attention?
Oracy is the disciplined art of speaking and listening. It turns passive attention into purposeful focus by externalising thinking and making learning visible.
How does Tongue Fu Talking® improve classroom attention?
It provides structured oracy practices—gestures, sentence stems, debates, and listening routines—that cue, sustain, and share focus.
Which oracy strategies make attention visible?
Because–So–But prompts, summarising, and structured debates reveal where students’ attention is directed in their reasoning.
How does oracy support inclusion?
By reducing cognitive load and providing clear routines, oracy helps all students sustain attention, particularly those with weaker self-regulation.
References
Gathercole, S. E. and Alloway, T. P. (2008) Working memory and learning: A practical guide for teachers. London: Sage.
Hobbiss, M. (2021) ‘Attention and learning: Why it matters and what to do about it’, Impact Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching, 13(1), pp. 34–39.
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