Owning Your Voice in the English Language

1. Introduction: Hi everyone, and welcome to this skill share course, owning a voice in the English language designed by myself, a voice and accent coach. My name is Molly Parker, and if you've seen my videos before, you will know that I work a lot in the actor industry and work on bringing acting skills in voice, accent, and communication into non performance spaces. Now, a huge part of why I do what I do and who I work with is with speakers who have English as a second language. And they say to me all the time, Molly, speaking is one of my biggest skills ever. In my first language. And when they come to speak in English, it feels like their confidence is gone. It feels like they can't hold a story and they can't hold people's attention. So it's part of my job to help them do that. Now, I do that by mainly working through the body. We work on breath, we work on stress, we work on rhythm, and we do a little bit about pronunciation, but not as much as you may think, because owning a voice in the English language actually is so much more than accent and pronunciation. It's about experiencing sound, experiencing rhythm. And making sure that you are connecting to your emotion and emotional impulse as a speaker when telling a story. So many times, people have come up to me and said, I've learned all of the RP sounds. I've learned all of the pronunciation, yet it still just doesn't feel authentic to me, and that is what this course is going to do for you because quite frankly, we have so many accents in the English language. That pronunciation, especially RP is not the beagle and end all. Actually, so much part of the joy of the English language comes through the stress, comes through the rhythm, and comes from learning how we can convey the message we want to convey while keeping true to ourselves through the English language lens. So that's what we're going to be covering today. As you can tell, it is not an easy task. It's quite a holistic way of viewing things, but it's really, really the core of my practice, and I think this work should be much more accessible. Throughout the course, you're going to learn the awareness of the body articulated in unvoiced and voice sounds. You're then going to learn how to ground the breath, working on connecting the true emotional impulse from the brain to the diaphragm and how to make sure that you feel as confident and grounded as possible in your own voice. You're also going to master a lot about stress and rhythm and learn that there can be unstressed stressed words and syllables in the English language. And then you're going to be looking at how we can lengthen certain vowel sounds in order to help with this. Before finally working on some active listening techniques to try to help you practice this as well as your project, which will be explained in the next video. I hope you enjoy, it's by no means an easy course that I've created. I look forward to hearing how you get on and good luck. Enjoy. 2. Class Project : Now it's time to talk about this class project. I've thought long and hard about what project would be good for this course. Honestly, the most useful thing is going to be hearing your actual voice. You are going to be tasked with a one to 2 minutes speech on a topic that you maybe are passionate about or something where you want to tell a story. It would be as simple as your favorite meal to cook, your favorite holiday, what you do for work, whatever you would like to talk about. You're going to be using the techniques that we learn together in order to prepare you for that one to two minute segment. Hopefully, you'll find a lot of breath, a lot of grounding, and maybe a lot of confidence in the process as well. By the end of the course, you can upload a voice or video recording of yourself speaking that through for feedback with me on the clarity, on the groundedness and the fluency of your voice in the English language. Enjoy the course and I look forward to hearing your voice. 3. Lesson 1: Awareness of Body and Articulation: Into lesson one, where we're going to be talking about awareness of the body. Now, if I said to you, where does your voice start? Usually, people think, well, it's somewhere around here, it's in my throat where my vocal faults are. But actually, we need to take it back even further. The first step of voicing is the brain sensor signal down to the diaphragm, the breath production starts, and that's air pressure builds up on the vocal folds and then voice comes through. So what's happening when you're speaking in multiple languages is this impulse is having to work doubly is hard because some of you may be translating some words into English, which takes a second before the impulse goes down. It's like you have that impulse to speak, but the connection is a little bit lost because you might have to translate. So what we need to do in order to help that is we need to grow a better awareness of our body because if you're not aware of the body, how can you start to own it in the process of voice? So we are going to do a little bit of a really gentle body scan and I'd like you to try to do this every day if you can after this course where I'd like you to find a place preferably somewhere a little bit quiet where you can focus, maybe feeling your feet on the floor or your shoes on the floor, resting your hands wherever they like to fall, and allowing your eyes to close. We're going to be working through the breath and also the articulators just to start becoming a little bit aware of where you naturally would find impulse to speak and where you naturally would disrupt airflow and where we might want to start centering it to help own the voice in the English language. Start to notice the whole body going down from the feet, moving up the legs, the spine, the shoulders, the arms, the hands, the fingers. I just start to notice any pockets of tension you may be holding, depending on your mother tongue or your first language, you may have more jaw tension. Or tongue tension, depending on what you use in your first language, mostly. A lot of speakers find it a lot easier to A own their voice in whatever language, but also own their voice in English when there's a little bit of jaw release. So I'd like you to just bring your attention through to your lips. Maybe just take an exhale and see if you can just allow the lips to relax a little bit, and maybe you want to do a little bit of a lip trill. Just like your sighing outs. I really feel the effect of the lip trill. We're releasing lips and that's part of the English accent as well. We're releasing those lips. Then you can maybe bring your mind's eye back around the back of the jaw and just think about this space here. If you want, you can take your hands or fingers even up to around the jaw muscles, around the back here and just start noticing, am I clenching my teeth? Can I create any more space in the back of the molars? Can I breathe this way? Now, can I sustain this space in the back of the mouth and release lips in the front and also encourage the breath to just drop low into the body? Like you're just calmly allowing the breath in and out of the diaphragm. Once we found this space in the back and this looseness in the front, we can try just some gentle articulation exercises. So I'd like you to take the tip of the tongue. I'm going to release the tip of the tongue out on the bottom lower lip. And I want you to see if you can kind of do fat tongue thin tongue, where we're going to stick the tongue out, and I want you to try to narrow it and release it like this. Now, some of you may find this very tricky. If you do, I'd really recommend my course on articulation itself where we go into this exercise in more depth. But the reason it's quite important is because depending on your first language, the size and shape that your tongue tends to be will differ to native English speakers. Often, the English accent will require quite a pointed tongue. The tongue is usually quite narrow, quite a lot of the time. In a lot of accents, you might actually notice that your tongue sits a bit heavier or it's a little bit wider. It takes up more space in the mouth, which often people feel gets in the way of fluency in itself. Practicing this narrowing and thickening of the tongue, kind of like tongue press ups, is a really good warm up way of just getting your muscles ready and adaptable to take on any clarity that you might need within any language. Once you've woken up the tongue, let's just take the tip of the tongue behind the front top teeth and just give me a I'm just tapping the tip of the tongue there to make a T sound. Now notice as I do this, I'm not using my jaw. A lot of you might want to go, tu we're not doing that. I'm keeping my jaw expanded. Once that feels comfortable, we're going to voice it so it would turn into the same place. Now we'll see what happens if you bring the back of the tongue upwards, so we release the tip of the tongue down and we hit the back of the tongue on cook. We're trying to get that as crisp as possible. You want to work towards a sound where there's as little splashiness as possible for this. For example. Then we're going to try to voice it. GGG. Again, not moving my jaw at all. Go. We've done the front of the tongue with the back of the tongue. Go. Now we can try the lips. B, B. I'm really trying to allow them. I probably wouldn't. Well, I just said the word, probably. Do you see how little tension comes into my lips when I speak it? Probably. The English language in itself comes really quite far forward in the mouth. So anything that we can do to ease the sensation of sound coming forward and everything being drawn forward in this releasenss when we're releasing that air is going to be really useful. B bop. So we have BG. But, go but, go. Then you might want to try just a word with every one of those sounds. We might say Polly, Polly, pool, Bolli, Bali, Bali. We really want to make sure we have the unvoiced and the voiced. Unvoiced, adding sound. Poly, Boley poly Boley. Then we might try teary, teary, teary, dreary, dreary, dreary poly Boley, teary, dreary. Then lastly, we might try cone, cone, cone then go go, gone. So we have cone, gone, teary, dreary, poly brawl. Obviously, you can play with any words that you like along that. But I think there's something very important about becoming aware of the whole body, releasing as much tension here, starting to release tension in the articulators, and then practicing those what we call unvoiced and voiced consonants. Hopefully, you feel a little bit more aware of what happens where and what you naturally are finding difficult. If you're finding a certain sound difficult, it's likely maybe that letter doesn't exist in your first language or maybe that's actually coming up in a lot of words where people really struggle to hear you. So do make a note of which sounds you want to prioritize because you don't have to do them all at once, but it's worth just noticing when do I really feel like I'm not being heard in the way that I want to and how can I practice that? Once you're there, the next lesson, we're going to look a little bit more about grounding the voice and feeling as much confidence in all of the great stuff you've been doing. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Lesson 2: Grounding and Breath: This lesson, I want to incorporate a little bit more in breath. We've worked a little bit of the articulators, but coming back to this idea that we have grown more awareness of the body and coming into this sense of, my breath is low. Perhaps you remember me talking in the last lesson about the process of voice actually starts with the impulse from the brain to the diaphragm. The diaphragm is this huge dome shaped muscle right underneath the rib cage. As I breathe in, the diaphragm contracts and flattens. As they breathe out, the diaphragm relaxes like so. When you are speaking in your second, third language, no matter, you know, how much fluency you have. Sometimes there will be days where you may think, Oh, gosh, what is that word, and even myself as a native English speaker. There are many days where I have an impulse to speak. I know what I want to say, but that words that I really wanted to use to describe something is just gone. Now, that mind blank, if you like, is usually the feeling of this impulse to the diaphragm being disrupted in some way. A lot of times we speak about this a lot in actor training. That happens when there's tension that exists right in the abdominal wall. So we want to really try to start practicing. How can we create space in the lower body for that diaphragm? Because if that diaphragm can't contract and flatten, then that impulse is going to be a lot harder to understand. So to have a feel, you can take your hands over round to your ribs and you can breathe in. And maybe you can feel your ribs, come outwards and you can breathe out. Good. And again, breathing in and out. And one more time in out. Beautiful. We're going to take one arm around the belly and one arm on the back and see if you can feel this expansion. Now, you might not feel this quite so much as you did with the size of the ribs. That's fine. As long as you can just imagine there's expansion as you allow the breath in, and out and breathing into the hands and out and in and out. Gorgeous. Now, most of the time I work with speakers and they are talking about this idea if they really just don't feel like they're owning their voice or they feel like they're really nervous when speaking in the English language and a lot of the time they're shallow breathing. Now, shallow breathing is when we're not breathing from this place and we're taking these gasps of air right up here. Now, that literally stimulates or it's the same breathing pattern as someone might be having when they're anxious or having a panic attack. So what happens in the body is the body has no filter. It doesn't understand when you are running for your life from a bear versus when you are trying to speak to someone in a really casual setting. If the body notices adrenaline, if the body senses those nerves, that will shut down. They just want to keep you alive because thankfully the primary function of the body is to keep you breathing rather than to keep you speaking. So all of what we're doing here actually doesn't work unless the body feels like it's in a place of safety. And that's so much easier said than done because we do get nervous as human beings, and nerves are a very natural thing, but something we work on as performers or actors do is they spend hours and hours and hours a month just doing breath exercises, just working on breathing in through the nose. Into that diaphragm's place and then breathing through the lips nice and gently. And actors train this part of the body to breathe in low because if you allow that breath in low as you speak and you don't let it uphear, then that panicky sensation is not as strong as it could be if you are breathing in that shallowness. So it might seem like something that's a long term goal. However, it's so important to just start getting used to breathing into this diaphragm to keep your nerves at bay and to help that impulse to speak and ultimately help your confidence, clarity, and fluency. It's literally the start of everything. So what we can do is first thing you can do is literally just every now and again, every couple of hours, if you work at desk job, for example, you can just breathe into the ribs, breathe into that space. But if you wanted to incorporate this a little bit more into what we were working on in the last lesson with unvoiced and voiced fricatives, what we can do is you can allow the breath in and we can exhale on an S sound first. A long exhale. I'm just allowing that breath through the teeth. Now you'll notice this is unvoiced, which means that there's just breath coming out. If I now ask you to do it on the voiced equivalent, we allow the breath into that container. Mm. We have a z sound. Now, you know when you're making a voice sound if you feel vibrations. So if you places a hand on the chest or even if he plays a hand on your back, I can feel lots of vibrations in my spine. Some people feel it in their skull. Every day, it'll probably be very different. But just do that one again and see if you can feel the buzz or the vibrations there. Yeah, so maybe you feel that. What we can do is we can go through those exhales with an S and then we can do a And then you'll see that the articulator work that we were doing does not change between those sounds. It is simply the vibration that is changing. Let's try the same thing on the key one for this because remember, we're also working on grounding and nerves and we're doing unvoiced and voice consonants. I'm hoping this course is a great way of giving you practical ways of killing two birds with 1 stone. But what we're doing now is we want to make sure that those exhales are long because that's going to keep our breath grounded. Breathing into the diaphragm, And then allow the breath in again, voice it. Feeling those vibrations. Lovely. And the last sound we're gonna do is an F and then a V. Gorgeous. Now, you can do that as much as you like. You can do that as a warm up. You can do that in the shower. And it's just a way of really starting to feel, what is that difference between unvoiced and voice? Because I work with a lot of speakers where that's not very clear when they're speaking English, what is an unvoiced sound and what is a voiced sound. So that's really, really useful, hopefully to start growing that awareness. Then when you come into integrating this into your speaking day, perhaps you have a big meeting. And let's say you have a big meeting you are having to talk to a client about the logistics of your next project, and let's say you wanted to practice this. Well, I would actually practice it on fricatives. What I mean by that is if your pitch started with, good morning, Helen. Really looking forward to speaking to you today about XYZ, perhaps you want to practice this breathing because you might go good morning, Helen. Really excited to speak to you today, especially considering that the last quarter was like this, and I'm really excited to speak about this. And you notice that I'm really bringing that shallow breath in, and I'm really unconnected and it's probably not as clear or grounded. Whereas what I can do instead is I can place my hands either on my ribs or on my belly and my back. I can allow that breath in, and I'm going to fricative the words. Hi. Notice, you can't see my shoulders go up at all. I'm going to do that again. So I'm imagining I'm saying, good morning, Helen, but I'm zinging it. Is easy. I'm going to speak it. Good morning, Helen. I'm looking forward to speaking to you today, especially considering the news we had last quarter or whatever is most important to you. You can probably hear in my voice, and I for sure, can feel in my voice that it feels much more grounded, so much more centered, and I'm really working on allowing longer pauses in order to get that breath down. I think usually shallow breathing comes from this idea of, please speak to me. I really need you to hear me and I really want to make sure that I'm filling the space. But actually, pauses can be so, so so. Impactful. Hopefully, you're able to find that impact just by allowing those pauses and allow your breath to go in. Something you can do in the meantime, a little mini project, if you like, is almost video record yourself or voice record yourself in your next meeting speaking to someone because it's one thing doing this right now in class, but it's another to notice what you're actually doing in the wild if you like, or in your calls. Try to voice record or video record yourself speaking in front of clients and just notice, Oh gosh, yeah. I am gasping for breath. I'm not as centered as I could be. Maybe that's why I felt so anxious after that meeting, and hopefully you will notice that that's a connection to the impulse you have to speak as well. So hopefully you've enjoyed these last two lessons which have all been really starting to warm up the body, grow awareness to the body. Because now in the next session, we're ready to really start the practice. I hope you enjoy and thanks for joining. 5. Lesson 3: Stress and Syllable-Timed Language: Lesson three, we're going to be talking all about stress timed versus syllable time. Now, this is one where I think it's the heart or the meat of what we're going to be looking at because lots of research is being done in the accent world over non native actors working on doing a native English accent of some sort and why it's so difficult and most of the time it is because L two speakers, when they're speaking English speaking syllable time. Every word in a sentence and every syllable in a word is given equal stress. For example, if the sentence was, I love to sing and dance all day. They might say, I love to sing and dance all day. I love to sing and dance all day. I love to sing and dance all day. Whereas for me, I would have length and sounds, and it would be in what we call stress time, which is what we're going to be working on today where certain syllables are given a greater stress in the sentence, but also in the word itself. I love to dance every day. Now, dance in itself is a length and vowel. We're going to look at them in the next lesson, but I love to dance every day. I would not be giving that equal stress. Similarly, if you had a sentence such as, I'm going to the market tomorrow, I naturally am going to say, I'm going to the market tomorrow, I'm going to the market tomorrow, rather than I'm going to the market tomorrow. She loves to drink hot coffee. She loves to drink hot coffee. She loves to drink hot coffee, et cetera. You can sense that in the whole sentence, there are certain words that will be stressed. Now, this will depend on what you're saying, of course, and what needs to be said and what needs to be emphasized when you're speaking to someone. But usually, in the English language, we put emphasis on the second or third word in a sentence, and then we come down. You can imagine the stress is going. She loves to drink hot coffee. I'm going up and then I'm going down. She loves to drink hot coffee. The dancing was all night. I got a great night's sleep. Now, of course, there might be some sentences where it comes later in the word depending on what you want to say. For example, if you have descriptive words such as great or scary, then they're going to be where the emphasis is, but you're making sure that whatever goes up goes down. For example, last night I had a great night's sleep. Last night, I had a great night's sleep. Or I watched a scary movie. I watched a scary movie. Sometimes the rule can be broken depending on what you're trying to say, but usually, usually, you just notice that emphasis that I put on there. I'm trying to emphasize the beginning of a sentence. That might be for a lot of people, they describe the English language de voices nearing the end of a sentence, everything is just there. That's usually just because we're trailing off right at the end of that sentence. That we've talked about sentence by sentence, let's talk a little bit more about word by word because a beautiful fun and really probably quite frustrating thing about the English language is some words can literally change their meaning depending on the stress that you give it. Let's take the word present. Or present. We have two syllables here present, present, whichever way you look at it. Now, this is where stress becomes so important because if I am to stress the first syllable of this word present, present, present, then I'm talking about a gift that is wrapped up that Santa might bring you under the Christmas tree. Whereas, if I stress the second syllable in this word, present, present, present, then suddenly I'm talking about presenting a presentation at my next meeting. This is the same for a word like object. Or object. If I'm talking about the stress on the first syllable, object, object, object, then I'm talking about a literal object in front of me. Whereas if I'm saying object, object, object, then I'm talking about objecting to a rule. Same thing might happen in a word like conduct or conduct. If I'm talking about a conduct and I'm stressing the first syllable, conduct, conduct, conduct, then I'm talking about a rule. Whereas if I say conduct, conduct, conduct, maybe I'm talking about a conductor in an orchestra. The stress is so important for what you are saying and quite a lot of the time, people might not be understanding you maybe because you're not giving stress to the syllable that you need to do within the whole word and the whole sentence that you're trying to say. Unfortunately, there are certain rules that you can say with this, for example, if you're wanting to have a noun like object, present, we're usually stressing the beginning of that word, whereas a verb, such as a conductor or present is usually stressing the second syllable. But quite a lot of the time, this is the joy of the English language that might not be the rule all the time, do watch out. But usually, noun we're stressing the first syllable, verb, we're stressing the second. In two syllable words, usually, it is actually the first curtain. Mirror, lamp shade. Whereas if we have certain multisyllabic words, which may be three syllables, we're usually going to stress the first or the second in that emphasis. Sometimes this will change if there are two syllables there, three syllables there, or four syllables there. But for example, let's think about words where the primary stress is on that first syllable. Primary, primary. In fact, you can practice saying these words as you throw a ball forward. Primary knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, different, different different frisbee frisbee, Frisbee. Sometimes this could be three syllable words, seasonal, seasonal, seasonal allergy, allergy, allergy, customers, customers, customers. Naturally, naturally, naturally. Whereas let's say you are looking at a word where the primary brss is on the second syllable. En enrichment. Allergic Allergic, Allergic. Again, going back to this idea of nouns versus verbs, we have an allergy, but I am allergic description, description, description, projection, projection, projection, and so on and so forth. It can be quite tricky when you're first starting to think about, well, what exactly is the stress? Because as I said, there aren't necessarily massive rules. Usually, with two syllables, we stress the first one. With three syllables, we might stress the first or the second one. We'll very rarely stress the last syllable in any word, but you can think about it as nouns, one verbs second for now. The most important thing really at this stage is just starting to become accustomed to the idea that there are stressed and unstressed syllables, and there can be stressed and unstressed words in a sentence. Starting to fine tune your ear into starting to pick that up and noticing that actually you can change the whole meaning of one word depending on where you put that stress is a really important first step. If you are unsure, of course, there are resources online that you can use to have a look at certain words in itself. Hopefully you found that helpful, and practicing with this ball and with the hands is a really important step to starting to learn where those stress patterns are. We're going to build on this idea in the next lesson where we start to talk about length and sound, which hopefully starts to bring everything together a little bit more. 6. Lesson 4: Lengthened Vowels for Clarity : Okay, so let's talk a little bit about vowels, which is going to really help us with this whole stressed, unstressed stuff. Length and vowels are really powerful tool to help you with clarity, and they're also something that really exists within the English language that may not exist in your first language. You can also use length and vowels to carry a lot more emotional depth to what you're talking about. They could add emphasis. They can help you to avoid rushing and they create a much more deliberate and confident voice. Let's start with just growing an awareness of what actually is length and vowels. Try to listen really carefully to what I'm saying and bringing in the lessons we were talking about last time with stress, think about where am I holding that emphasis? I can't understand. Can you please repeat that? I can't understand. Can you please repeat that? Did you notice that there are stretched vowels in there? Can't, and please? They stand out because they have lengthened vowel sounds, which is literally the idea that I'm holding onto the sound in the vowel of each word. This elongation signals importance and gives my listener time to actually catch the meaning of what I'm talking about, which is especially important when you're trying to tell a story to an audience, sell or really try to help an audience or listener experience what you're experiencing. Now, there are certain vowel sounds that by nature are lengthened in the English accent. That is because the English accent is what we call a non rhotic accent where I don't always pronounce an R sound, for example, car far, far. I'm not pronouncing an R sound there. For example, a word like start in itself is quite a lengthened sound. Start because I'm almost carrying on the A where the R should be. Start. This is the same for a sound like thought. Thought and North North and force force. I started to have a thought about the North force. I started to have a thought about the winds up North. And do you remember in Lesson one, we were talking about the space in the back and this relax in the front? Well, this is literally where you can start seeing that I thought about the north winds. Can you see how my lips are really bringing the sound forward in the mouth, and there's lots of space in the so now that we're aware that there are certain sounds or certain vowel sounds that can be lengthened in the English accent, which will help us with the stress, then we can now start to identify, let's start to match up the length and sounds with the key words in a sentence. Can you say the word, I really want to go? I really want to go. I really want to go. Now, the acting world will talk about what is the objective in this sentence? What are you actually wanting to do? You're wanting to convince someone to go. So in order to help that, we're going to stretch out the word really. I really want to go. I really want to go. I really want to go. And you notice that I'm not having to raise my voice, I'm not having to do anything super drastic, really. I'm just stretching the sound. I really want to go. Suddenly, my intention is felt so much more by the listener because they can feel the urge in that stretch that I really don't want to be here and I really want to go. Whereas, how I say it the first time, I really want to go, it feels quite deadpan. It doesn't feel like there's much emotion there, and that's simply because I'm not stretching that vow. Let's try a few more. It's so beautiful outside. It's so beautiful outside. It's so beautiful outside. Now, the o sound is actually a diphthong sound, so we can lengthen this. It's so beautiful outside. It's so beautiful outside. It's so beautiful outside. How does that feel to slow it down and stretch it out? What about something like I love what you've done here? I overstretched there. What if we tried Dead time? I love what you've done here. I love what you've done here. I love what you've done here. What if we stretch it out? I love what you've done here. I love what you've done here. Better yet, let's take a whole wave idea from the last lesson into this. I love what you've done here. I love what you've done here. I love what you've done here and you can feel that with that rise and pitch and that carry off and that stretch, I'm suddenly lengthening sounds, which also helps us to slow down, which helps maybe to ground my breath, which helps maybe to think about the space and everything that we've been talking about starts to come together. I promise that you are A, going to be understood a lot more and B, you're going to be able to bring your whole world across or your emotions across in your communication when you learn when and when not to stretch or stress the words. When we're thinking about your talk for your project, I'd like you to try to pick a couple of words, a sentence that are your important words. So for example, if you are talking to me about what you do for a job and maybe you are a dog groomer, and perhaps part of the reason why you started to become a dog groomer is because you're really passionate about keeping dogs healthy. Then perhaps one word you may say is, I've been a dog groomer for the last ten years, which are the important words in that sentence for you, that depends on what you're trying to do in that sentence. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to maybe emphasize that you've been doing this job for a long time. So maybe the important words are ten years. So maybe we're going to elongate. Yes. I've been a dog groomer for ten years. I've been a dog groomer for ten years. If you're talking about something else you're passionate about, maybe it was the most amazing experience of your life, amazing experience of your life. And maybe you felt so grateful to do it, so grateful to do it. Now, I know when you're first starting to do this, it might feel a little bit comical or carcature. But remember, if you take 2 minutes a week even just to really speak over the top, in fact, do 2 minutes every other day, then your body tends to hold a little bit of that. If you practice something really full out, really slowed down, really over exaggerated, then quite often when you then go back into speaking in your normal voice, then your body's kept 20% of that, which will probably land you in the space you want to be. If you are someone who has been told you're a little bit dead Pam when you speak or you're a little bit monotone, it's probably because you're learning when should you stress the words and when should you stress the syllables? When should they be lengthened? And how can that lengthness help you in terms of trying to get what you want to say out? I really look forward to hearing your juicy words in your project, and this is something that I'm going to be really listening out for. 7. Lesson 5: Active Listening and Mimicry: We're starting to practice these techniques of grounding the breath down of learning unvoice versus voice of learning these stress patterns and learning how to emphasize, which is a lot of stuff. I wanted to take a second to talk a little bit in this lesson about active listening. Ultimately, great speakers are also great listeners and if you've just moved to England or if you're not that used to speaking to English speakers, then you'll probably find that as much exposure to native English speakers is going to help you start owning the language even because you're going to start actually listening and understanding more about what I mean with these stress patterns and lengthen sounds. If you start to listen to the rhythm and the natural flow of the English language, as well as the tone, how emotions are felt throughout the English language, and also the delivery and how someone actually delivers information, then you'll probably find that your overall confidence in the English language is going to improve because just by osmosis, as you listen, you start to learn and you may start to embody that as well. I'd like to practice a little bit about active listening and just see if you can listen to what I'm going to offer you. By active listening, we just mean we're listening to the way that speakers speak rather than just kind of understanding and hearing it, you're trying to feel what I'm saying, as well. So for this next sentence, I want you to simply try to listen to the stresses. So which word is emphasized? The pause? Where did I leave a pause? And the tone? Do you think the voice rises, falls or stays flat? For example, I really don't want to go, but I might have to. I really don't want to go, but I might have to. What do you notice? The stress is on really. There's a pause before the word butts, and I started to go up and down at the end. Now, of course, when I'm doing that nice and slowly, it's very easy. But if I said that in a whole sentence, such as Well, after this, I'm going to have to go to the doctors, and I really don't want to have to go, but I'm going to have to. Then maybe it's a little bit harder to hear that, right, because I'm suddenly taking that same pattern, but putting it into free speech where there's so much more information to go off of. So while this sounds like a really simple exercise, actually, when you're listening to someone in free speech, it gets a lot harder. Here's one way you can try to practice this, which I know a lot of people do already, which is kind of trying to mimic and shadow speech. So what you can do is find a short recording, maybe a 30 seconds or so of a native English speaker. If you like, you can use part of what I've been talking about in this video. Could also be a podcast, a YouTube clip or someone just reading something aloud. In the first listening, you're going to have a listen through and just start to listen for those rhythms, those pauses, those rise and falls of pitch, and you can note this down as a mark on where you feel the stress, a slash where you feel that pause, or even ups and downs as you hear the pitch go up and down as well. Once you've done that one time, you're then going to speak it through with them. You play it through the second time. Maybe it's that same 30 seconds. Maybe you can even slow it down if you're watching on something like YouTube or audiobook, and you're going to try to speak and copy that same stress level. Don't worry about the accent for now. Too many people rush towards getting their sounds correct. This is much more important before the accent. It doesn't matter what pronunciation you've got, but if your rhythm and your pauses and your stresses are there, then I promise you're going to start owning this language without doing anything to your accent. Just start with this stress, this rhythm, all of that first on that second time round. Then you're going to try to repeat that two to three times in the same way. Now, if it's helpful for you, like it is for me, I'm a bit more of a kinesthetic learner, then you can even do a slash when you know there's a pause, you can go up and down with your body when you know the voice goes up and down, or you can even clap the stresses as well or lengthen those when you feel that lengthen. Really start to embody this in a certain way. It's almost like you're coming up with your own interpretive dance for what it is. For example, if we go back to my sentence of I really don't want to go, but I have to, maybe I do a wave of I really don't want to go, but I have to. Maybe I just do a slash with that pause. I really don't want to go. But I have to, or maybe I stretch it out. I really don't want to go, but I have to. Then of course, maybe you want to do all of it. I really don't want to go. But I have to, or whatever works for you. You're going to repeat that with your speaker two to three times. Now, once you start to practice this with a few speakers, maybe you can do this exercise once a day if you have the time to really start shadowing the way these speakers are speaking, you'll start to notice that this can all differ depending on the emotion of what your speaker feels. For example, usually in the English language, when someone is feeling a little bit angrier, they might be a little bit quicker, a little bit heavier that as if they were a bit playful. Example, let's take the sentence, I can't believe you've done this. If someone was angry, they might go, I can't believe you've done this. I can't believe you've done this. And I'm really stressing that sound that we practice in lesson one. I can't believe you've done this. Whereas if it was playful, I can't believe you've done this. I can't believe you've done this. I can't believe you've done this. But usually consonants feel heavier, more at tacky, vowel sounds feel smoother and more flowy and more emotional. So usually, if someone's feeling a little bit flirty or a little bit playful or a little bit jokey, then actually it's the vowel sounds that will feel quite stretched out. Whereas if someone's feeling a bit heavier, a bit annoyed, a bit snappier actually, it's the consonants that are going to be articulated a little bit more, and maybe you start to notice this. Maybe you don't, but maybe if you start to listen to different speakers, speaking in different emotions, you can let me know if you agree with me or not. But either way, the tone will drastically change depending on the emotion of what they are saying. Then the stress on each word will carry different emotions and maybe the stress even changes depending on what they say, which I know can be frustrating. You get to this point of understanding English, you understand these rules, and then I'm saying it all goes out the window. Unfortunately, such is the nuance of communication, which is why the most important thing throughout the journey is making sure you keep the awareness of your own body and you really work on the listening skills as well. But remember, only the English language is actually about embracing this nuance that may come with it. It would be pretty boring if I had this course and I go, Okay, these are all the rules for you. Because unfortunately I can't produce that if anyone is producing that, then I think that's a little bit of a red flag. What I can offer you is skills to start exploring these sounds, these words, and all of these different nuances yourself. Hopefully, you find your own nuances when you're speaking the English language that help to express your own emotions as well. Now, if we go back to our project idea, I'd like you to pick maybe two sentences or if you've written down what you want to speak through. I want you to record yourself delivering them once you play back your recording, I want you to just see, are you pausing in the same way your native English speaker does? Are you stressing in the same way your English native speaker does? Can you add any of those changes in? Can you think about this dance and apply it to those sentences? Then perhaps you can experiment with different emotions depending on what you're saying. Can you imagine that you're wanting to be a little bit angry when talking about something that went wrong in your favorite holiday, or can you feel a little bit of joy and excitement about the next holiday that you're talking about, and see what that does to the stress levels and then again, compare it to the native English speaker that you've been listening to. So it's really like an experiment. We're seeing if we add a bit here, leave a bit here, and then recording back. The reason we're recording back and listening back, sorry to yourself is because in the moment, your ears are really unreliable. So it's really important to go off of the feel of how something felt. Did it feel authentic to you and then listen to see if you can hear that. So now that we're practicing active listening, not just to other people, but to yourself, I'm looking forward to the next session, which is all about putting it all together. 8. Lesson 6: Pulling It All Together: Congratulations. You have made it to Lesson six, the final lesson, pulling it all together. So in this course, we have worked through grounding your body and bringing awareness to our articulators and our breath, stressing keywords for emphasis and also learning that there can be stressed and unstressed syllables, lengthening vowels for clarity and active listening to improve your tone, rhythm, and connecting to your audience and your emotional impulse. Now it's time to bring all of these two together for your final talk. Let's talk a little bit about preparing your talk. Taking a mopin to gather yourself, stand or sit comfortably, feel your feet on the ground. Breathing deeply, maybe bringing your hands back to the ribs, hands back to the diaphragm, the belly, and the back, and just noticing how your body hopefully feels relaxed but also alert. Let's just do a quick mental checklist. Is your talk one to 2 minutes long? Are there any keywords that you want to emphasize throughout it? Where do you think you can add these natural pauses to help tell the story a little bit more and also to help the breath drop in low? Are there any words where you can really stretch those vowel sounds for clarity and for emphasis to tell that story more? Then you can start to think about speaking your talk aloud. Let's start with a deep inhale through the nose and a calm exhale. You can take your voice recorder and you can deliver your talk in a moment while keeping your breath low, steady, avoiding rushing, stressing those keywords, lengthening those vowels, and including those pauses. In a moment, I'm going to invite you to record your talk and to reflect. Before you listen back, how did it feel? Did it feel very different to how you would usually speak? Did it feel more connected, more like you were owning parts of it? Did it feel weird? And once you have recorded it, you can feel free to listen to it. Is there any moments where you've sounded really clear and confident where maybe you feel like, Oh, I wish I'd lengthen that bit out because I really think the emotion was lost before I said that. Did you hold the vowels enough for clarity? Did you hear those unvoiced and voiced consonants clear enough? Could you hear any gasps for air? Perhaps you want to re record anything and try a few more times. You can just make small improvements each time, even if that's by 1%. And ultimately, before I send you off to do that, remember that owning your voice is a journey and what it means to own your voice is not simply to sound like a native speaker. That's actually a very boring way of looking at it, but owning your voice in the English language is reconnecting with your voice, but through the English language lens. So this is about reconnecting with the emotional impulse that you have, the story that you want to tell people, and hopefully help your confidence and fluency along the way. Thank you so much for joining me on this course. It's been such a pleasure to take you through these things. If you have any questions whatsoever, do feel free to lead it in the community tab or in the comments, and I look forward to hearing all of your wonderful voices as you upload it into the projects tab. Keep practicing, celebrate those little wins, and I will see you on the other side. Bye. 9. Conclusion and Project Reminder: Congratulations to you for finishing this course all on owning your voice in the English language. So just as a conclusion and to wrap up for all of these wonderful lessons that you have joined me on. We have grown more awareness of the body, especially our articulation when thinking about unvoiced and voiced sounds, thinking about space in the back of the mouth and also releasing the lips. We have understood why we need to ground the breath, why we need to keep the body calm, and also how to do all of this stuff while sustaining unvoiced and voiced fricatives. Then started to master stress and rhythm, just starting to grow awareness of the fact that there can be unstressed and stressed syllables, as well as stressed and unstressed words in a whole phrase and starting to practice that ourselves by listening to native speakers and really trying to pick up and develop an ear for what is a length and sound? What is a pause, what is a stress pattern, and how do my emotions fit into it? It's so much that you've covered. Danica said at the beginning, it's quite a holistic way of exploring this voice. Exploring this because that's how I like to work, and that's what tends to happen. If you do like the way I like to work, remember, I do work with people one on one. So do find a way of contacting me either by my email or on Skillshare, and I can book you in for a free 50 minute consultation to discuss how you are and what your goals are like in the English language. But thank you so much for joining me. I hope it's been helpful. Do let me know if you have any questions, and I look forward to hearing all of your wonderful voices. Cheers, everyone, and don't forget to check out my other courses in case they fell in any of the gaps that not been answered today. Bye. See you soon.