On Course

Perfecting Your Vocal Technique

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By James M. Lang

After you have finished reading this sentence, go back and say it out loud.

If you pronounced it from beginning to end with vigor and volume, you are a born actor. But you might have found yourself doing what most of us do instead: speaking the opening words with vigor, which slowly dissipates so you wind up saying the last few words at a markedly quieter volume.

If you did that, it's because it comes naturally. We expel our breath as we speak, so it becomes difficult to maintain the same level of volume and emphasis.

Unfortunately, the structure of many English sentences leaves crucial bits of meaning until the end of a sentence. In my opening line, for instance, the most important part -- the injunction to read it out loud -- only comes at the end.

If you're chatting with your spouse over dinner, or speaking to a student in your office, a dip in volume might not matter much. But imagine the difference it could make to a student in the back row if you're lecturing in an auditorium to 300 undergraduates, and giving crucial information they will need for the next exam.

As much as we might want to resist the notion of teaching as a performance -- thinking that our focus should be on student learning -- it can't be denied that our voices, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness.

As an academic, you surely know that from experience. You have sat through lots of lectures in your life, at least one of which must have come from a listless or unskilled speaker whose ideas you admired but found hard to follow.

It might help to think about this issue as one of communication rather than performance. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate our questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and making a deep impressions on their minds.

Few of us have time to take courses on vocal delivery or effective performance, and we might feel that time spent improving our course content would make a greater difference to our students.

But improving your teaching performance does not require a massive outpouring of time. It begins with becoming mindful of the issue and your own habits. And then it is simply a matter of following some basic guidelines and paying attention to how you speak and move.

Here is a vocal technique you might try. I first heard this advice in a teaching workshop given by Ann Woodworth, an associate professor of theater and an acting teacher at Northwestern University.

Woodworth asked participants in her workshop to stand up and deliver the opening few lines of a lecture in their discipline. As they repeated the same lines over and over, she demonstrated how often we speak as I described above -- losing steam throughout the sentence and falling away dramatically in the final words. She also pointed out multiple instances in which speakers skimmed over or de-emphasized the crucial words in a sentence, placing emphasis instead on less-important parts.

I know from my own experience teaching students to scan poetry -- i.e., to identify and mark the syllables that the poem stresses -- that poems usually place emphasis on nouns and verbs, which typically carry the meaning in a sentence or line of poetry. The same holds true for your average English sentence.

That leads to two very practical tips you can follow when you are speaking:

• Place the emphasis in your voice on the nouns, verbs, and key concepts of a sentence.

• Build the sentence to an emphatic conclusion, rather than letting it trail away.

Try to read the following sentence aloud, placing the emphasis as I have indicated: Content matters, but how we communicate that content to our students (pause; big finish) also matters. The point is to draw the listener's attention to the meaning-carrying elements of the sentence.

My first reaction upon seeing Woodworth work with faculty members and trying her technique later at home -- "if you don't pick up your clothes off the floor, I'm going to ground you from now until you're (dramatic pause) a teenager" -- was that it seemed impossible to imagine paying that much attention to my words while I was speaking and still trying to make sense.

But you don't have to rehearse your lectures for hours or highlight all of the verbs and nouns in your text in order to work on your vocal techniques. Start small.

In your next lecture, pay attention to your vocal delivery for the first five sentences you speak, or for the first five minutes of your lecture. Then forget about it and concentrate on the content.

Do that every day, and you'll find what I eventually found -- that those five minutes kept stretching farther and farther into my lectures. Vocal strategies that seemed so daunting to me initially had become second nature.

I also found it easier to practice the techniques on material that I knew well. I started with lectures that I had delivered multiple times, and only gradually was able to build more sophisticated vocal deliveries when I was speaking off the cuff.

Obviously, becoming a more polished speaker does not necessarily make you a great teacher. But it can make you a better one. Complaints about disruptive students and their "classroom incivilities," to borrow a phrase from Robert Boice, are loud and vociferous these days, but it can't be denied that such behavior frequently arises because we are boring our students.

A better understanding of the performative aspects of teaching can lead to a more attentive and less unruly classroom. A student mesmerized by a great speaker will be less likely to text-message his friends throughout class than one who is sitting through yet another monotonal performance, however stimulating the content.

I've only scratched the surface here of ways in which teachers can communicate more effectively. Gestures, movement around the classroom, exchanges with students -- you can improve all of those aspects of your teaching, and just about any experienced acting teacher can probably help you do so to some extent. But you can also get such information by attending a workshop or from a video on the topic.

For your final assignment of the year, take what you have learned here today and use it to articulate this sentence with vigor: I'm going to enjoy my summer.

Repeat as necessary.