Using Drama Activities to Teach Pronunciation

[Music] [Applause] [Music] actors use various voice activities in order to warm up their voices improve their projection and just improve their overall vocal delivery many of these drama voice activities can be used with our English language learners to help them improve everything from phoneme articulation to intonation and stress in this session we'll take you through some of these drum activities for voice so that you can try them with your students just a warning some of the activities may look and sound a little bit goofy but they work we'll start by taking a look at why we should use drama activities to help our students with their pronunciation then we'll move on to activities for breathing and posture and activities for warming up the vocal cords then we'll get more specific with activities for consonant and vowel production word stress and sentence stress and intonation we'll take a quick look at volume and pacing activities and then we'll wrap up with activities to help our students express emotion let's get started [Music] in order to be effective and successful actors have to be very versatile with their voices they have to speak at different volumes different speeds and with different accents all in order to convey a story and portray a character acting coaches and teachers have developed a lot of different activities to help actors achieve this type of range with their voices many of these activities are also useful for language learners as these learners try to master a brand new language these activities can help the learners with everything from phoneme articulation to word stress to intonation and most importantly to expressing emotions and ideas correctly and accurately [Music] in order to help our students with their pronunciation we're going to take them right back to the beginning and that is to posture in order to have good pronunciation and good vocalization we have to stand in such a way that we can fully use all of the vocal tools available to us for good posture we should have our feet shoulder width apart our knees should be slightly bent so loose not ramrod straight and not really bent our hips should be comfortably over our knees and our spine should be straight as if someone were playing a string right up through the middle of our bodies to pull us straight and our shoulders should be slightly back here's a short activity to make students both aware of good posture and to have them practice it have all of your students stand up and find a partner and then partners face each other and both people assume a good posture position that I've just described partners then critique each other in order to help them fix their posture so that it's the best that it can possibly be breathing is obviously a very automatic activity for us as human beings it's one of the crucial functions that keeps us alive however actors and also singers train themselves to breathe in a particular way in order to get full vocal range and this is breathing from the diaphragm the diaphragm is a sheet of muscle that stretches across and separates the chest cavity from the abdominal cavity it is naturally part of the breathing process so we always use the diaphragm when we breathe however consciously breathing with the diaphragm means that we're paying attention to the muscle contraction to help us get more volume and more air passing through our lungs to make your students conscious of breathing with their diaphragms have everyone stand up and place their hands just below the ribcage first of all have them just breathe normally then give them the task of trying to make their chest cavity as big as possible when they breathe in and push as much air out of their chest cavity as possible when they breathe when they do this they should feel more action right here where their diaphragm is so have them try this a few times and point out that this is what is called diaphragm breathing or breathing with the diaphragm there are two activities that we can do with our students to make them even more aware of how much their vocal capacity increases when they consciously breathe with their diaphragm the first activity is simply to have students hum and they keep the hum going as long as possible and really work their diaphragm to push air out through their mouths and keep that hum going another activity we can do with our students so that they're very conscious of breathing with their diaphragm is to have them explosively expel air and so they can make the sound for example Hut and do it as hard and as explosively as possible so they go huh-huh-huh-huh to make them really feel the power of the diaphragm have them place their hand here as they do it and then they can feel it in action so they go huh huh huh I told you some of these activities were gonna be a bit goofy so your students have to have a sense of humor but this really helps them to feel the power of the diaphragm at work once they've done some HUS have them change the sound to hop and then heat and then hope in order to achieve the full range of our voices we also have to be able to control our breathing so have your students try these activities for the first activity have students breathe as deeply as they can and get as much air into their lungs as possible then have them hold their breath for a count of five and finally have them expel the air as quickly and as explosively through their mouths as possible so it looks like this have them repeat this three or four times here's another one have students breathe very deeply once again and hold their breath for just a count of two this time and then have them whisper one through ten as they slowly expel the air then help them try this again so it looks like this and stop these are just two examples of breathing activities to help us control our breathing there's a lot of other ones you just have to search the internet try these with your students so that they can learn to control their breathing we also need to make our students aware of the different tools that we have available to us as human beings to make sound we call these the vocal instruments I've given you a diagram under activity 3 on your handout that shows you these different vocal tools or vocal instruments the vocal tools include everything from our lips to our nose our teeth our tongues our vocal cords and our hard and soft palates some of these vocal instruments are muscles or they're controlled by muscles and like all muscles we need to warm these vocal instruments up so that we can use them most effectively when were producing sound so I'm going to take you through some exercises to do with your students to warm up their vocal instruments the first activity is just to have students yawn so they open their mouths as widely as possible then have them yawn and make a really loud sound finally have them yawn and then make it go on a descending scale so I'll demonstrate this one so you're yawning and you're starting from high and then going to low have them do this one a few times you're gonna get some last when you do all of these activities but that makes it fun for the next activity have students imagine that they have a big gob of gum or toffee or peanut butter in their mouths and they're trying to chew it so have them too up and down and then sideways and chew this piece of gum or toffee or peanut butter in as many different ways as possible so it looks like this and keep it going a lot longer than that so students really stretch their mouths and all in all sorts of strange positions next we want to have students stretch out their tongues so they're gonna point their tongue out and then put it up and down and sideways and make it in circles so I'll demonstrate this one - excuse my tongue here so have students do it for a longer time and exaggerated as much as possible next have students warm up their lips so they're just gonna make a buzzing sound with their lips and they have to keep them really loose in order to make this sound and have them keep it going as long as possible so it sounds like this and just have them keep going much longer than that as an extension of buzzing the lips have students hum a song as they buzz their lips a simple song to use for this is happy birthday so I'll get started but I won't do the whole song I can build a tune can i anyway have them continue doing that for much longer take them through the whole song next have students massage their faces so have them massage here and then up here and then to the sides obviously much longer than I'm doing here of the massage under here and their chins and under here so just make sure they massage all the different areas on their faces to really loosen it up finally have students make and then hold an exaggerated facial expression have them do this multiple times and try different facial expressions each time so it looks like this and so on you can get a lot of laughs out of this one too next we're going to take a look at activities that you can do with your students so that they can practice making particular consonant and vowel sounds or phonemes you might want them to practice sounds that they have particular difficulty with we're just sounds that are part of vocabulary words you're learning at this point in time to help you with this we've provided you with the International phonemic alphabet at the end of this activity on your handout this helps you see the full range of consonants and bowel sounds that you might want to have your students practice we're going to start with activities to help your students with consonant production the first activity helps students produce the plosives and affricates in english so these are the sounds that involve a lot of explosive air coming out of the mouth so for this activity pick one of the consonants and simply have students repeat that consonant over and over and over again with an exaggerated articulation so it sounds like this [Music] cukoo cukoo cukoo cukoo cukoo cukoo cukoo cukoo took a good googa and so on with whichever plosives or affricates you want students to practice we can do a similar activity to have students practice sounds that require a steady stream of air as opposed to an explosion of air so these are our fricatives and our nasals for example so we can have our students practice holding the fricative sound or the nasal sound for as long as possible so for example Shh shhh for as long as possible or for as long as possible and once again we want them to use an exaggerated articulation when they're producing the sound another activity that we can use to help our students with consonant production is tongue twisters these are not new for language learners what is new is that we're going to say them with exaggerated articulation so we're not going for speed we're going for really really exaggerated use of our vocal tools in order to produce the sound so here's an example of what this sounds like and also what it looks like six thick thistle sticks six thick thistle sticks six thick thistle sticks and so on with really exaggerated use of those vocal tools I've given you a bunch of different tongue twisters to use for different consonant sounds now let's move on to activities for vowel production these are quite similar to the activities for consonant production so for the first activity how students stand up and start walking around the room and as they're walking they're producing a vowel sound and then change up the vowel sound every few minutes have them keep the vowel sound going for as long as possible so students are walking around and they're saying e and then you change them to all then maybe o and then maybe a and so on another activity for vowel production is to have students say a series of short words all of which start with the same consonant but which have a different vowel sound and they say these words as quickly as possible multiple times and then move on to another series of short words that start with a different consonant but have the same series of vowel sounds you'll see these words given in your handout under the second vowel production activity here's what this sounds like mu mo ba math may be mu ba ba that may be and so on and then you would move on to another continent with the same series of bowel sounds a similar activity has students practiced just two vowel sounds once again with a variety of consonant sounds and students are once again going for exaggerated articulation take a look at Val production activity number three for samples of words and sounds that you can do with this activity and just for fun here's what this one sounds like ha ha ha hee ha ha ha hee ha ha ha hee ha ha ha hee and then go on to the next one cut cut cut key and so on we can also use tongue twisters with exaggerated articulation for vowel production practice we've given you some possible tongue twisters in activity 4 under the vowel production section here's an example have students say toyboat multiple times with exaggerated articulation toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat and so on or he threw three balls he threw three balls and saw we can also use short poems to help our students with bowel production they're going to recite these poems once again with exaggerated muscle movement the poems that are useful for this activity are usually children's poems we've given you two examples under activity 5 in the vowel production section and I'll recite one of these for you this poem which we'll use as an example is from dr. Seuss his poems are great for this type of activity this comes from the story Fox in socks through three cheese trees three free fleas flu Wow these fleas flu frizzy breeze blew crazy breeze made these three trees freeze frizzy trees made these trees cheese fries that's what may these three free fleas sneeze you'll notice that this poem just had students practicing one or two key vowel sounds there are other suitable poems out there that allow students to practice the wide range of consonant sounds so pick your poem according to which types of vowel sounds you want your students to practice we can use nonsense words to help our students practice both consonant and vowel production nonsense words use the real sounds of English but these sounds are put together in a way that don't make real words the most famous person who made use of nonsense words is Lewis Carroll with his poem the Jabberwocky we've given this to you on your handout so you can use this poem with your students once again you want them to recite the poem with exaggerated articulation when actors deliver a line of dialogue they pay a lot of attention to stress both word stress and sentence stress where we put the stress when we say something can go a long way to delivering a particular message or to conveying meaning we have activities that we can use with our students that help them make decisions about stress words stress and sentence stress so let's take a look at some of these activities the first activity focuses on word stress to start this activity review with your students what the schwa is as a reminder the schwa is the unstressed version of many of the English vowel sounds it's the most frequently occurring vowel sound in the English language because we do unstress many of our vowel sounds for this activity gives students a list of vocabulary words with which they're already familiar have them work either individually or in pairs to figure out which vowel sounds take the schwa so which vowel sounds are unstressed students then practice saying these words with those choir's in the appropriate places then house 2 contrast the natural pronunciation of the words with the choise in place with a strong pronunciation of the words which has no choise so for example instead of saying banana which has to choise in it in the unstressed syllables have students say bad mana then they can contrast both the weak form which has the SWA's and the strong form which doesn't and emphasize that when they're speaking they should naturally use those weaker forms another activity to use so that students can practice saying the natural weaker forms of words versus the unnatural stronger forms of words is to have them recite a poem the first time they reset the poem they use the strong version of every single word in the poem the second time they recite the poem they put in the weaker versions which have the choise in them where those weaker versions would naturally occur I've given you a dr. Seuss poem to use as an example so I'll recite a few lines as an example just first with the strong version in every word and then the second time around I'll have appropriate weaker versions where they should be here's the first verse of dr. Seuss's happy birthday to you first of all with the strong version of all the words if we did not have first days you would not be you if you had never been born well then what would you do if you had never been born well then what would you be you might be a fish or a toad in a tree here's the same first verse of the poem but with the appropriate use of the weaker versions in order to get the rhythm of the language if we didn't have birthdays you wouldn't be you if you'd never been born well then what would you do if you'd never been born well then what would you be you might be a fish or a toad in a tree the next activity is an activity to use so that students can practice sentence stress so have all of your class all of students in the class stand and and you're going to say a sentence and it should have maybe at least seven or eight or nine words in it the student immediately next to you is going to say the sentence exactly the same except this student is going to stress the first word in the sentence then the next student will repeat the same sentence but place the stress on the second word in the sentence and then the next student stresses the third or in the sentence and so on and just keep going around and around and around always stressing one different word in that sentence and it doesn't matter if you repeat the sentence multiple times you want students to really start to listen for what happens when a different word in the same sentence is stressed an activity that allows you to put the concepts of both word stress and sentence stress together used to house students recite a poem that has a very obvious rhythm to it children's poems are very good for this and I once again picked dr. Seuss because as I told you I like him to start the activity you're going to recite the poem first and as you're reciting it make sure you get that natural rhythm of the poem and to help you snap your fingers or tap out the rhythm as you go then how students join you so all of the students are reciting the poem at the same time and you're keeping time and students can also help you keep time by snapping their fingers themselves this activity lets students really start to hear that rhythm that goes with English and how we achieve it through word stress and sentence stress I'll read out one of the dr. Seuss poems that we've given you so that you can hear this in action oh the places you'll go you have brains in your head you have feet in your shoes you can steer yourself any direction you choose you're on your own and you know what you know and you are the guy who'll decide where to go [Music] next we'll take a look at some drama voice activities for intonation intonation is not important in English for conveying actual word meaning however it is very important for conveying emotional information so let's take a look at some activities for intonation how students stand in a circle and indicate one student who's going to start the activity this student will say a short sentence or phrase with a particular intonation students going all the way around the circle have to repeat that short sentence or phrase with exactly the same intonation that that first student used then you're going to move on to the second student who has a different phrase with a different intonation and just keep going all the way around the circle until each student has had the chance to initiate this activity here's an example the first student says thank you then the second student has to imitate it exactly thank you and the third student thank you and so on then for the next round another student starts it off maybe they say oh that is so cool and so then all the students have to say oh that is so cool and so on and so forth until every student has had the chance to start the activity you can do a variation on this activity by having students simply say an emotion word and then having their intonation and stress match that emotion so instead of saying thank you and all the students copy that a student can simply say sad and then all the students have to go sad and the next student after that's gone all the way around the next student can say happy and all the students have to copy happy and so on to start the next activity you have to introduce the concept of gibberish gibberish as we know is a language just of nonsense words so it uses different sounds but none of those sounds go together to have meaning so we accused babies of using gibberish when they babble and communicate because it doesn't mean anything once you've explained the concept of gibberish to your students have them find a partner one of the two people in the partnership is going to tell a story and it can be a personal story that just happened to them recently but they're going to tell it in gibberish so they don't have access to any words to communicate what this story is the person has to tell a story simply through intonation they can also use word stress facial expressions and gestures if you want to be nice to them once this story has been told in gibberish the person's partner has to retell the story in English so the partner has to interpret all of the information received through intonation and create a story this can get really fun because you can get some very strange variations on what this story really was [Music] actors also use volume and pacing to deliver a line of dialogue in a certain way to convey a certain emotion so we're going to look at some activities that you can use with your students so that they can start to understand the impact of pacing and volume on their vocal delivery give students a short poem and then as a class have everyone recite the poem and first of all students are going to start quite slowly as they speak and then they'll pick up the pace and then in the next first have them start going quickly and then take the pace down and so on through each verse so slowly quickly quickly slowly slowly quickly and so on we can do a similar activity but this time students are varying the volume so they start the verse very softly and then their volume gets lighter in the iron ladder they start the next verse very loudly and then it gets softer and softer and softer and so on through each verse in this way students can start to hear the impact of volume differences as a final activity have students sing a very simple song that probably everybody knows so for example row row row your boat and then for each line of the song tell students to either say it or sing it very softly very loudly very quickly or very slowly so every single line of the song is said with either different pacing or a different volume [Music] we're going to conclude by looking at activities that allows students to pull together all of the tools or all of the skills that we've looked at in terms of vocalization in order to convey particular emotions so we have three activities that will walk you through here for the first activity have students stand in a circle students are going to take turns saying the numbers 1 through 20 so the first student will say the number one and the second student will say the number two and the third student will say the number three and so on and just keep going around and around and around the circle until you decide to stop the activity however here's the twist if students say the numbers one through five they have to somehow convey the emotion of happiness through how they say the number if they say the numbers six through ten they have to convey anger and if they say the numbers 11 through 15 they have to convey sadness and finally the numbers 16 through 20 they have to convey excitement when students have the idea of how to do this activity so you've done it a few times you can make it more complicated you can add more emotions so you instead of just working with four different emotions you can have students work with six or eight different emotions so they have to remember which numbers are associated with which emotions the next activity is called a house party so first of all make sure students know what a house party is so it's a party at someone's house and everybody comes and kind of brings something and there's lots of food and lots of things to drink and people just chat and catch up and make small talk you indicate that students are going to arrive at this house party in a specific order and then each student is going to arrive feeling a particular emotion so assign the students their emotion so student one might be anger students who might be happiness student three might be nervousness student four might be frustration and so on when each student arrives at the house everyone who's already at that host party is going to take on that emotion that that student brings so the first person at the party just does their emotional when the second person arrives those two people both have to exhibit the same emotion of that second person so if the second person is happiness both people at the house party are happy then the third person arrives and let's say this person is sad so now all three people at the house party have to act and communicate as if they're sad and so on and continue this until everyone's arrived at the house party then you're going to reverse the process so say when the last person arrived this person had the emotion of nervousness so everyone at the house party is nervous that person is now going to be the first person to leave so as soon as the nervous person leaves everyone at the house party goes back to the emotion before that let's say that was frustration then the frustrated person leaves and everyone goes back to whatever was before that let's say sadness and so the students believe until there's only that one single person left and then your house party is over the last activity will give you involves the use of a poem again so give every student a copy of the same poem and they're going to all recite it together each line of the poem however will be said with a different emotion so for the first line every student is going to somehow convey happiness for example and for the second line they have to convey anger and for the third line they have to convey joy and then for the fourth line they have to convey nervousness and so on so each line of the poem is said with a different emotion a variation on this is to have each student read just one line of the poem with a particular assigned emotion so have the students stand in a circle and assign each person in emotion and then just go around the circle reciting the poem one line at a time with each person applying his or her emotion to their line we've taken you through a lot of different drama voice activities that are very effective with language learners these activities help language learners produce sounds accurately so they help students with the phonemes of English but they also really help students to accurately convey their ideas and their emotions through the use of word stress sentence stress intonation volume and pacing try these activities with your students and have a lot of fun while you're doing it [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Advance Consulting for Education

Views: 1,374

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Advance Consulting for Education, ACE, Teaching English, English as a Second Language, Teaching ESL, ESL, EFL, TEFL, TESL, TESOL, Teaching Tips, Teaching Techniques, Teaching Strategies, Teacher Professional Development, Teacher PD, Professional Development, The PD Exchange, The Professional Development Exchange, www.thepdexchange.ca, teaching pronunciation, how to teach pronunciation, using drama to teach English, www.aceducation.ca, Dianne Tyers

Id: eKq2kqDpwcc

Length: 33min 39sec (2019 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 01 2019