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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.

Looking for oracy activities for primary schools and KS3? This guide shares six practical oracy lesson ideas, from sentence stems and mini debates to structured presentations and reflection. Perfect for embedding speaking and listening skills into everyday teaching, these classroom talk strategies work across subjects and support progression, inclusion, and assessment with the Tongue Fu Talking® Oracy Framework.

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.