If you’re not familiar with Patsy Rodenburg, then I encourage you to look her up. She describes herself on her website as a ‘master voice teacher’ and has been working around the world for years, primarily with actors, business professionals and public speakers, to help them discover their authentic voices and to speak with passion, clarity and presence. She has written numerous books on the topic and has recently begun a wonderful podcast called Craft: sweat and joy where she explores this topic further with her guests. Her books and podcast are littered with nuggets of wisdom that speak volumes to what it means to be an educator in 2025. I was recently struck by an important quote I read in her book The Right to Speak (Rodenburg, 1992) in which she states:
When you speak well, every cell of your body should be engaged naturally and without thinking in the act of speaking. Watch a baby cry, a bird sing or a dog bark. In each instance, you can see the whole body is fully involved in generating sound . . . speaking is never just from the neck up.
– Patsy Rodenburg (1992)
This didn’t reflect what I was seeing in my own classroom, so I wanted to find ways I could get my learners to open up physically and vocally.
With dependence on laptops and mobile phones increasing day by day, it’s easy for learners in our classrooms to lose their focus and become distracted. When this happens, their physical presence is diminished, as is the connection to their voices – which when speaking a foreign language may already be a weak one. While pronunciation work in our classrooms is extremely important, simple and rote modelling and drilling doesn’t do much to connect our learners to the words they are using – intonation can remain flat, faces unexpressive and vocal energy dissipating after only a few syllables. So how can we get our learners to engage more with the words they are using to make sure speaking involves the whole body and a full voice? Here are several ideas I’ve tried out that have injected energy into both my classroom and the voices of my learners.
Physical warm-up
A physical warm-up with your learners is a great way to wake them up and get them into their bodies. When our learners feel embodied they become present; when they are present they connect more deeply to what they’re saying. A simple warm-up might involve some of the following:
- shaking the body – begin with an arm, then a leg, then both arms until the whole body is involved
- head / neck / shoulder rolls
- pretend to chew some chewing gum
- clean your teeth with your tongue
- pretend to eat a fake apple
- pull a funny face
- say some tongue twisters.
If we’re spending most of our classes using our bodies and voices, then it makes sense that we warm them up! A simple warm-up can relieve physical tension and ease anxiety by grounding learners and bringing them into their bodies.
The power of ‘hey’
While hey, hello and hi are common greetings, they also contain an important sound: /h/. This sound is important because it bridges the gap between the breath and the voice. Try it now – softly whisper a /h/ and let it build until you notice the vocal chords engage and a sound emerge. Noticing this connection and warming it up is important if we’re to communicate with ease and confidence. A lovely way of beginning any class is to get your learners to choose a greeting (it must begin with the /h/ sound) and then mingle to greet each other. They must make eye contact and practise releasing their chosen greeting with their full voice. In this way, learners become more connected to each other and it injects energy and presence into any classroom.
Vary your drilling
Modelling and drilling is a tried and tested way of checking a learner’s spoken accuracy, but I’ve always felt it can make learners feel nervous and sound inauthentic. There are so many ways we can encourage our learners to have fun and feel relaxed during pronunciation drills while allowing a diverse range of pronunciation features to emerge naturally. You could try:
- vowel sounds only – the vowel sounds contain the emotional energy of an utterance.
- register – ask learners to repeat the phrase in different contexts i.e. to your best friend, to your boss, to your pet, to your sibling, to your king / queen or president.
- volume – use your hands to encourage learners to increase and decrease the volume of the utterance.
- speed – similar to above, learners speak more rapidly and more slowly leading eventually to slow motion.
- overarticulate – learners speak the utterance with as much articulation as they can manage; this is like gymnastics for the face and mouth!
Feeling emotional
We are compelled to speak when we feel something – and that feeling informs the intonation, speed, vocal quality, volume, pitch and physicality with which we speak. When modelling and drilling (or any other time you’re focusing on pronunciation) it can be a fun idea to get your learners to layer various emotions over the top of whatever it is they’re saying. This can be executed in several ways. I often write down several different emotions on pieces of paper and hold these up for my learners to embody when they are drilling a word or phrase. Furthermore, I always have a bag of ‘emotion cards’ with me in class and I get learners to choose one (keeping it secret!) and to then mingle repeating whatever words or phrase(s) you’re working on with that emotion. Their partner must then try to guess the emotion. As you can imagine, this is a lot of fun and learners automatically start playing around with intonation, volume, pitch, speed and body language in a way that feels natural and more authentic, rather than trying to repeat and emulate whatever the teacher has modelled. If you would like a list of emotions you can use in your classes, please send me an email and I’ll send you through my own list.
The weight of stress
Feeling the stress timing of English is important. This rhythm needs to be fully embodied – but finding ways our learners can feel this rhythm is often a challenge. Clicking the fingers or clapping on stressed words works well, but an even better idea is to use a paper ball. I get my learners to scrunch up a piece of paper and throw it in the air on the stressed word(s) in an utterance (this can also be applied to syllables in individual words). Learners must maintain the sound of the stressed syllable or word until the ball lands back in their hands. I also get learners to walk around the room when doing this. Yes, it can feel a bit chaotic but it’s a lovely way of getting learners to physically engage with sentence and word stress at their own pace and you’ll notice they will start to think about sentence and word stress much more. Another great use of a paper ball is to help learners notice the difference between long and short vowels. If you’re working with minimal pairs like / ɪ/ and /i:/, it can be a great idea to get learners to say a word and throw the ball into the air for the long vowel sound, maintaining the long vowel sound for the duration the ball is in the air. Learners can also throw their ball to a partner and maintain the long vowel sound until their partner catches the ball. Not only is this technique a great physicalisation of stress and vowel length, it’s also an excellent visual reference and aims to connect both body and breath to these important features of English.
Context is everything
They way we speak is informed by the context we find ourselves in. A great task is to get learners to build short dialogues with whatever grammar and vocab you’ve been working on and then get them to design two different contexts in which to explore the different features of pronunciation. Example dialogue:
A: What’s your name?
B: Paul
A: Where are you from?
B: France
A: How long are you in London for?
B: A couple of weeks
Contexts
- You’re in a very loud nightclub on a night out with university friends.
- It’s your first day at a new language school with a tired and bored receptionist.
Learners can prepare and practise their dialogues before performing them for the class. The class have to guess what the two different contexts were and a discussion about the different pronunciation features of each can follow. This is an excellent awareness-raising task, and the different interpretations of context are both insightful and hilarious!
Pros and cons
This work, with the right group, can be a lot of fun. It really serves to connect learners to their bodies and breath. Consequently, confidence in what they say increases (whether or not the grammar or vocab is correct) and the levels of presence in their ability to communicate also increases. However, working in this way can be both triggering and highly confronting for some learners. It requires learners to step out of their comfort zones and connect with their voices and bodies in a way they may never have done before, so don’t be surprised if you experience some resistance to these ideas. That said, don’t let this put you off trying them out. I have taught many classes where I truly felt like learners were not going to be open to working in this way and I couldn’t have been more wrong!
To circle back to Patsy Rodenburg’s quote, speaking is a physical act and it’s our job as ELT professionals to help our learners communicate with greater ease and confidence; this can only occur if students have an emotional connection to what they’re saying. Learning and speaking another language presents huge challenges so it’s important we approach this with a sense of fun and exploration rather than a list of prescriptive features our learners should artificially impose over what they are saying. Working with these ideas allows features to emerge in a natural way, with vocal and physical confidence building over time. Look at the way you’re approaching pronunciation in your classes and if you feel your learners might benefit from some of these ideas then try them out!
