Advance speaking skills

• Speaking well or the skill in speaking may give

a dramatic effect in your life as an individual.
You may not realise, but people judge you by
how you speak and what you say. But experts
say that people put a higher awe by the way
people speak not what people say.
From the quality of your voice and your
manner of saying things, people will
deduce a great deal about your personality
and your feelings at the moment of
speaking-whether you are feeling
confident, say, frightened, excited, or
friendly. They will glean information about:
• Your age and sex- If you are speaking on the
telephone and they cannot see you.

• Your physical and psychological condition-poor

health often reveals itself in the voice, as does stress.
• Your personality- if you always speak very quickly, for
example, you may give the impression of lacking
confidence. If on, the other hand, you drawl your
words, you will tend to sound bored or supercilious.

• Your geographical and social origins, above all from

your accent.
• Your mood-a lilting flexible voice, full of expressive
changes of pitch and pace, suggests a buoyant mood,
whereas a ‘tired’ or ‘flat’ voice suggests a more
reflective, subdued mood or even depression.
• Your intelligence or expertise-clear, confident
articulation usually indicates a firm and intelligent
grasp of a subject. Stumbling or hesitant speech often
indicates confusion or uncertainty.
• Such judgments are surprisingly accurate-though not
invariably so. Sometimes the impression you create
by the way you speak will be unfair, negative, or
misleading. You may be a world expert on aviation,
for instance, but if you mumble nervously when
giving a lecture, you will probably come across as far
less knowledgeable as you really are.
• No one, however, needs to be a slave to poor
speaking habits. These habits can be broken-
and breaking them will certainly be worth the
effort. Improve your speech, and you boost
your confidence, sharpen the impression you
make on others, and communicate more
effectively, at work, in public, and in your
private life.
• Not that, in learning to speak better, you
should never speak in a way that is unnatural
to you. Your voice is unique to you, just as
your fingerprints are, and to distort it- as by
aping a supposedly ‘correct’ accent- is to
distort your true personality and emotional
range when speaking.
• There is a process to be followed so you
may pronounce words properly. These
processes should be given importance so
as not to sound unnatural.
Relaxation Process

• Relaxation refers to the relative

degrees of the partial contraction in
the muscles. It is the partial or the
complete absence of tension.
The parts of the body
that needs to be
relaxed are:

 Soft Palate
 Arms
 Jaw
 Legs
 Tongue
 Trunk
 Face
 Neck
 Lips
 Larynx
 Throat
 Why do you need to relax?
For preparation of the speaking
process.
It lays the foundation for a good
voice.
So the speech mechanisms would
move with precise timing, which is
important for a good voice
production and clear articulation.
• The more flexible the body is, the
more pleasing the voice will be.
The speaking process
1. Breathing stage
Breathing stage consists of two
phases:
1. Inhalation
2. Exhalation
The principal organs involved are:
 Lungs – the reservoir of air.

 Diaphragm – a large sheet of muscle

separating the chest cavity from the
abdomen, forms the floor of the chest and
the roof of the abdomen.
Correct breathing can be attained by
following these activities:
1. Inhale deeply and/or more rapidly
2. Maintain a steady pressure of air as
you talk
3. Maintain an adequate breath
reserve
2. Phonation Stage
Takes place when voice is produced
in speaking as the expiratory air
stream from the lungs goes up
through the trachea or wind pipe.

Larynx is found at the top of the

trachea; it protuberance is known as
the “Adam’s apple”
• Vocal Cords- attached to the walls of the
larynx, it opens and closes at various
degrees.
Open widely during silent breathing
Open partly in whispering
Come together under tension and the
controlled air pressure from the lungs
cause them to vibrate in speaking
Responsible in producing voiced or
voiceless sounds
3. Resonation Stage
The process of voice amplification and
modification is called resonation.
It becomes strong and rich only when
amplified and modified by the human
resonators: upper part of the larynx, the
pharynx, the nasal cavity, and the oral
cavity.
Larynx- the voice box; the hollow
muscular organ forming an air passage to
the lungs and holding the vocal cords
• Pharynx - is the part of the throat that is
behind the mouth and nasal cavity and
above the oesophagus and the trachea, or
the tubes going down to the stomach and
the lungs.
Nose
Nostrils – the openings of the external
nose

Septum – the structure from the bridge of

the nose back through the internal nose
The effective use of the resonators together
with the force of the expiratory air stream
will enrich and reinforce the voice produced
by the vocal cords.
4. Articulation Stage
• Occurs when the sound or tone produced
in the larynx is changed into specific
sounds such as the alphabets.
 Voice Quality
• Specific sounds produced in the
articulation stage becomes more
meaningful when accompanied by an
appropriate voice quality. Vocal tones
depend principally upon a steady flow of
air for adequate loudness and upon the
absence of the hypertension in the larynx
for purity of quality.
A voice may be intelligible, yet it may not
be able to communicate. It may be
unpleasant or even irritating to listeners. In
this lesson, some common types of poor
voice quality including their causes and
treatment will be discussed.
 Deviations in Quality
1. The throaty voice
2. The thin voice
3. The nasal voice
4. The denasal voice
 Throaty voice
- originated from the throat sound
“mushy”, unclear and poorly projected. This
is often described as coarse, heavy, hoarse,
husky or hollow. Sometimes the throaty
quality is caused by a temporary physical
condition such as the common cold or
pharyngitis in which case the throatiness or
huskiness disappears as soon as the cause
is eliminated.
 Thin Voice
- sometimes called as the weak voice, is
more present in women than in men and is
generally caused by the use of a pitch
range that is not suited to the structures of
the speech mechanisms. There is a lack of
resonance in this kind of voice.
 Voices that are breathy, harsh, metallic,
thin, or whining fall under this category.
Vocal exercises to improve this faulty
quality include the coordination of
breathing with speech, easy vocalization,
and the development of a rich, pleasing
resonance.
 Nasal and denasal voice
The nasal and denasal voices are caused
by disturbances in the nasal resonance. The
nasal sound is the result of nasaling the
oral sounds, while the denasal voice is the
result of not nasaling nasal sound.
• To lessen nasality you must learn to guide
the air stream through the mouth and not
the nose when producing oral sounds.
One commonly-used means of doing this
is to control soft palate so that it will rise,
close off the nasal passage on oral
sounds, and relax, thus opening the nasal
passage on the nasal sounds.