Improving diction: 9 tips on how to become a real speaker

The word is a very powerful tool with which you can convey your point of view to others and even win them over to your side. But for it to work for you and not against you, it is important to be able not only to choose the right words, but also to pronounce them.

How to improve speech and diction at home if you don’t have the time or desire to work with a specialist or attend public speaking courses? Below we give some tips that will help you achieve noticeable results.

Set of exercises

You can learn to speak quickly only through regular training. To train and develop articulation, you should perform the following exercises:

• Sit straight in front of the mirror, focus on your own face. Raise your eyebrows up and fix them in this position until they get tired. Next you need to close your eyes for a second, open your eyes and relax. Smile wide and wide and curl your lips into a tube.
• Open your mouth as wide as possible, move your jaw to the right and then to the left.
• Open your mouth wide, wide, lower your jaw and stretch your lips. Without closing your mouth, try to bring your lips together.
• We stretched our lips, now we train our tongue. Try twisting your tongue a little and running it across the roof of your mouth, reaching all possible and impossible areas. Imagine that the tongue is a roller, and the sky is the ceiling, which needs to be painted with this roller.
• Let's move on to sounds. You can do this exercise before bed, when you realize that you are very tired and begin to yawn widely and sweetly. Just do it not quietly, as you are used to, but loudly, making the following sounds: ah, eh, oh, oh, uh.
• Let's imagine that we are gargling. Your task is to do the same, but without soda solutions. Just throw your head back and make the characteristic sound of gargling.
• Open your mouth, lower your lower jaw, but without tension. Place your fist under your chin and try to close your mouth with it. The lower jaw should resist with all its might. Press harder and harder each time, while trying to keep the lower jaw in place.
• Take air into your cheeks so that they inflate, and sharply release it with a sound characteristic of this action. Then puff out your cheeks without opening your mouth.
• Hold the air by puffing out your cheeks and seem to roll it from one side to the other, either increasing or decreasing the size of this balloon in your mouth.
• The last exercise is fish. Pull your cheeks in as far as possible. Lower your lower jaw and begin to open and close your mouth.

Such exercises will help develop articulation and also learn to speak quickly. It is only important to do the complex on a regular basis and not forget about tongue twisters.

What's stopping you from speaking English?

Let's look at not psychological, but specifically linguistic reasons that may stand between you and fruitful communication in English.

Insufficient level of language knowledge

The vocabulary of native speakers is 10,000 - 20,000 words. For anyone learning English, 2,000 words are enough for comfortable communication on everyday topics, which corresponds to the Pre-Intermediate level. As you can see, everything is not so scary!

To start speaking, you must master a minimum grammatical vocabulary:

• present tense - Present (Simple, Continuous, Perfect);
• past tense - Past Simple;
• future tense: Future Simple and construction be going to;
• modal verbs: have to, must, can, may, might, should;
• indirect speech;
• passive voice.

If your English knowledge is at the Elementary or Beginner level, you need to improve it to Pre-Intermediate. If you have already overcome this bar, then you are ready to communicate in English. Yes, such conversations will not be ideal and easy, but you will definitely be able to express your thoughts in accessible ways.

Nothing to say on the topic

If you feel like you don’t know what to talk about, start by developing your Russian speech. Take any object or phenomenon. Think about what thoughts and emotions you feel towards him. Try to find several subtopics within this broad topic. Then talk about this subject or phenomenon for at least one or two minutes. Exhale. Try the same thing, but in English.

For example, take the topic “Vacation”. It finds its own response in each of us. Some people travel to the same favorite country every year, others appreciate diversity and contrast. Some save for renovations and rarely allow themselves tourist trips, while others cannot live without constant adventures. What can you tell us about the topic of vacation?

Structure of answering oral questions

We analyzed the monologue. What about dialogue? Let's imagine that you are asked a common question. For example:

What is your favorite kind of food? -What is your favorite food?

If panic arises in your head and the gastronomic variety creates complete chaos, take your time. The fate of humanity does not depend on your answer now. Think calmly and only then speak according to an approximate scheme:

1. Introductory sentence:
   It's difficult to choose because I like many different dishes. — It’s difficult to choose, because I like many dishes.
2. Answer:
   I think pasta with meatballs is my favorite. — I think pasta with meatballs is my favorite dish.
3. Reason/Example:
   My wife cooks it very well. And I also like to order this meal at a restaurant. It is so delicious. “My wife cooks it amazingly.” And I also like to order this dish in a restaurant. It's so delicious.
4. Conclusion:
   Well, if I had to choose just one, I would definitely prefer pasta with meatballs. “Well, if I had to choose only one thing, I would choose pasta with meatballs.”

By practicing answering questions this way, you can get rid of the “I have nothing to say” problem.

We have looked at the reasons that interfere with conversational speech. Now let's move on to practice. Are you preparing for negotiations, presentations or other work-related communications? Most likely, now you are nodding affirmatively. It’s the same with speaking English: you also need to carefully prepare for it. But not everyone has time for this. If you need to speak English confidently “yesterday”, we have a solution.

Working on your voice pitch

The pitch of your voice can make a strong impression on those listening to you. If your voice sounds high-pitched or choppy, you may sound nervous. A moderate timbre sounds more convincing and attracts listeners. A low voice tends to be persuasive and dominant.

Don't change the pitch of your voice on purpose to avoid unnaturalness, but nevertheless, it is still worth controlling it to achieve a more balanced and soft speech.

You can raise the pitch of your voice without fear of looking stupid if you want to highlight a certain idea or focus the listener's attention on something specific.

Correct speech of schoolchildren

The formation of clear pronunciation of sounds has its time. During the first 5-6 years of life, this process occurs easily (if there are no speech therapy or neurological problems). After 6 years, making sounds is much more difficult.

Intelligible pronunciation of correct sounds is trained much later - at 6 years of age. Schoolchildren sometimes find it difficult to express their thoughts, answer in front of everyone, or give a speech loudly, since they lack rhetoric skills and have not developed diction. How can you help your child?

Diction training with tongue twisters

At primary and middle school age, children remember rhymes and tongue twisters well. This needs to be used for work. Rules for practicing with tongue twisters:

• You need to teach them no more than three, so that they are aimed at practicing certain sounds.
• The text is pronounced clearly and slowly, and unclear words are explained.
• It is better for a child to practice by seeing himself in the mirror - he better understands how his articulation works.
• The child should be encouraged to pronounce the tongue twister in a singsong voice, with emotion. This is especially effective for schoolchildren who stutter.

After such lessons with correctly selected tongue twisters, children communicate clearly and can be understood.

Factors that prevent you from speaking well

Children today often make stylistic and other mistakes in communication. This indirectly affects their academic performance.

The enemies of beautiful speech for children and youth are:

• Parasitic words are speech garbage that clogs up communication. At the same time, it is difficult to listen and perceive information. The reason for filler words is the inability to form thoughts and a small vocabulary. To solve the problem, maximum communication on various topics is required, focusing on eliminating such words from speech in order to express oneself competently.
• Obscene words - schoolchildren use them especially often. Reason: copying parents, significant adults and peers. Prevention: such words should be excluded from family communication; when used, it is important to explain to the child their uselessness in the conversation of well-mannered people.
• Slang is words that are of no use to schoolchildren. At this age it is difficult to get rid of them, as they emphasize the status of a teenager. But here, confidential communication with parents is also necessary for their complete eradication.

Smiling and public speaking

If information is presented to a person in a friendly tone, the speech becomes pleasant, inspires confidence and is better perceived.
Be sincere in your emotions, this will help change your speech for the better. The key to success as a speaker mainly depends on the ability to win over the audience. When speaking in public, most people feel very nervous. If you manage to pull yourself together and understand that you are in a hurry and worried, calm yourself down and try to speak more slowly. Breathe correctly, this will help you analyze your speech and be calm.

Remember that it is important for people to hear and listen to what you have to say.

Watch your intonation and pronounce each word with pauses. This will allow people to hear and understand you. Write several sentences on a piece of paper and underline the last letter of each word. When reading the text, focus on these letters, after taking a short pause.

The Greek thinker Demosthenes, to combat stuttering, spoke with a mouth full of pebbles. You can also practice with something more edible. Be careful not to choke.

When speaking in public, it helps a lot to think carefully about all the words before pronouncing them and get unnecessary thoughts out of your head.

How to learn to speak loudly and clearly. How to master public speaking. Learning to speak loudly.

There is a category of people among us who cannot speak loudly and expressively enough. How many misunderstandings or awkward situations have been caused by a timid, quiet voice! Owners of such a voice feel insecure, sometimes they are ready to fall into the ground. And buy a ticket at the box office, and ask for change, and answer an exam, teach a lesson, and many other things you need to use your voice for. A phrase pronounced loudly and clearly will always look more confident than mumbling something quietly. Oratory is an art! We need to learn this, but first we’ll learn to speak loudly.

Instructions

Difficulty level: Not easy

1 step

Do breathing exercises. First exercise. Learn to breathe on a count, when inhaling, count to 3, hold your breath - 1, exhale - 3, hold your breath - 2. Second exercise. Inhale intensely and deeply through your nose and mouth, and exhale slowly, pursing your lips. Third exercise. Slowly, evenly inhale the entire volume of your lungs through your nose; when it seems that you can’t fit in more air, try to inhale a little more, exhale intensely, pursing your lips into a tube.

Step 2

Let's practice speaking. Before you start speaking, take a long, deep breath, just like you did in breathing exercises. At the same time, the volume of the lungs is filled, and the sound is stronger. Start with vowel sounds or syllables (mi-ma-mo-mu). Choir members do similar exercises when chanting.

Step 3

Prepare several phrases that contain non-complex words. You can take poetic or song phrases. For example: “The boy wants to go to Tambov!..”. Say them while amplifying your voice. You can sing, don't be shy! By the way, many people like to sing in the bathroom. After all, there the voice is warmed up, and the acoustics make the voice stronger.

Step 4

And also keep in mind that in a conversation, when delivering your speech, speak with your diaphragm, and not with your throat or lungs. The diaphragm is the center of air regulation in our body. It is located directly under the lungs. So imagine that your sounds appear from your stomach. At the same time, the timbre of the voice will become lower and easier to understand. Having learned to regulate the strength of your voice, you will achieve a positive result!

Step 5

During these exercises, you need not only to develop breathing and ligaments, but also to overcome some psychological barrier. To check your results, record yourself during voice training sessions. Then compare what happened at the beginning of the lessons and what happened as a result. It should work!

Can you build sentences?

Even if a person knows many different words, but has difficulty constructing sentences, then listening to him is boring and uninteresting.

To learn how to construct sentences, retell movies and books more often to friends or to yourself. Watch your speech patterns, do not pour water, speak briefly but clearly.

Add emotions, watch your friends' reactions. If your story is bad and uninteresting, then their attitude towards your story will immediately be reflected on their faces.

To become an interesting conversationalist, this technique will help: write down in your diary your impressions of a movie you saw or a story you read. Do this as often as possible until you like the sentences you use to express your thoughts. Make sure that parasitic words: “like”, “this”, “so to speak” disappear forever from your vocabulary.

How to learn to speak confidently and convincingly. Speak beautifully and convincingly, how important this is.

Learning to speak beautifully in our time is really important. I am often approached with the following questions: how to influence a person with speech?; “What should I do: no one hears me, no one loves me?”; “Nobody listens to me, what should I do?”; “People don’t hear me and people in the company don’t notice me, how can I improve the situation?” In general, all these questions can be reduced to one topic: how to speak beautifully in order to interest!

Intrigue with a phrase

Almost every person wants to speak in such a way as to intrigue and captivate any audience and so that people listen attentively and even with delight; I want to intrigue listeners literally from the first words - with one phrase! And this is a normal desire. Good speaking skills will help you find a job and, most importantly, not lose it and be a valuable employee.

A young man who knows how to speak beautifully and convincingly will definitely attract the attention of a girl and will be able to negotiate with his superiors about a salary increase. And someone who cannot show off his intellect and the ability to conduct a dialogue is unlikely to be able to come to an agreement even with a girl, even with his superiors, or even with a neighbor.

What is needed for this? A similar topic has already been partially discussed in the article “How to become a good interlocutor,” because a speaker, a teacher, and indeed any storyteller, must become an interlocutor for listeners. Continuing the topic, we will now figure out what should NOT be allowed in a conversation so that the listeners do not lose interest in you and what, on the contrary, you need to do to arouse this interest in the listeners.

Speaking correctly and beautifully means developing speech.

INTONATION There is nothing surprising if they do not listen to a person muttering something, muttering under his breath and stuttering. Have you ever paid attention to HOW you speak? How do you tell it? Can your intonation be described as enthusiastic, selfless, romantic, expressive, surprising, mysterious, bewitching, frightening or alarming? Listen to the emotional force with which you tell others something. If you find it difficult to evaluate, there are several ways to do it: ask others, record it, listen to yourself and compare with others (interesting storytellers).

WORKOUT . To learn how to speak soulfully, emotionally and impressively, you need to practice. How to develop speech? One of the simple and effective training is to repeat the actor or announcer’s intonation. Repeat, “imitate”, record on a tape recorder, listen to yourself from the outside and repeat again, record, listen... . Achieve maximum similarity in your training.

What can a modern speech therapist offer for the development of speech of a child and an adult?

“The longer I work as a speech therapist, the more new and interesting things I learn,” says Vita Belukha. “Children change, parents change, and we, specialists, must keep up with the times. Today, a speech therapist can use a wide variety of techniques in his work: logorhythmics, music therapy, body-oriented techniques. Music improves the tone of the cerebral cortex and also evokes positive emotions in the child. The motor system is directly related to the development of his mental functions and so on.”

Speech is one of the most complex types of movement, and these movements always have some purpose. After all, we usually speak with a specific purpose, and not just move our tongue, move our lips and strain our larynx. Therefore, if you think about and analyze our usual life, it is impossible to imagine a single sensation that we could get without using movement.

“In my work, I first develop a skill separately - for example, pronouncing sounds in the syllables “ra-ro-ru”, and then combine this with simple movements: for example, hands down - “ra”, hands up - “ro” , arms to the sides - “ru”. And only then I “turn on” more complex activities. As a result, the child’s activities become more complicated, but he still does not lose the acquired skill,” our expert shares the secrets of his technique.

Through physical activity, children are much more interested in working, and the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities are given to them more easily and are better consolidated. This is especially true for children with severe speech impairment (SSD). Using various technologies in speech therapy classes, it is possible to achieve significant improvements in the correction of these problems.

Replay

This advice applies to artistry, but although we do not train stage speech, its basics are necessary. You know, you can not finish playing (mumble without intonation), or you can overplay (read too emotionally). We need exactly the second one. It is necessary to train this skill alone at least in the initial stages - otherwise others may not understand.

You need to cast aside your embarrassment and start playing as if you were a theater actor, and a tragic climax is happening on stage. Wave your arms, depict emotions on your face from suffering to delight, read in different voices, shout. Become a people's artist of the country for a while. You may have poor diction without practicing tongue twisters, but expressive, emotional speech compensates for this deficiency.

Diction in adults

How can adults learn to speak clearly and distinctly? In adulthood, diction training is also effective. There are professions where you cannot do without competent and clear speech: radio host, announcer, politician, teacher, manager and others. It's never too late to learn to speak beautifully.

Strengthening muscles and speech breathing

The following exercises are useful:

• Count as you exhale to 5, 10.
• Read tongue twisters in one breath.
• Inhale quickly through your nose, hold your breath for 5 seconds, and exhale for a long time through your mouth.
• On the sound “r” you need to change the intonation and volume.

Articulation development

It is better to conduct all classes in front of a mirror. Some of them will be funny, but they are effective in developing diction.

• In front of the mirror, stick your tongue out as low as possible, then hide and close your lips.
• With your lips closed, brush your teeth clockwise and counterclockwise with your tongue. Repeat “cleaning” 15 times in one direction, then the same number in the other.
• Puffing up your cheeks will help pump up your facial muscles. Then you need to move air through the oral cavity, you can use water.

Basic tongue twisters

The exercises described above will help you speak confidently in public, but it is also important to learn not to “swallow” endings. This can be achieved by practicing the fast pace of pronunciation of tongue twisters:

• I'm a vertical climber. I can stumble, or I can twist my stump.
• There is grass in the yard, and firewood on the grass.
• Sasha walked along the highway and sucked on a dryer.
• The otter dived into the otter's bucket, the otter drowned in the bucket of water.
• The scales are on a pike, and the bristles are on a pig.
• You can’t talk through all the tongue twisters, you can’t talk through all the tongue twisters quickly.

Diction training is important for competent and understandable expression of thoughts. Clear speech is the work of parents from childhood. If there are problems with speech, it is better to solve them before the age of 6; at this age they are relatively easy to correct.

Examples of eloquence.

A prominent representative of such speech eloquence in ancient times was the famous orator from Greece. His name was Demosthenes. From birth, he had a weak voice and was tongue-tied, but thanks to his fanatical zeal in training, he became the most famous public speaker in those days. A number of exercises, such as: reading out loud, small pebbles behind the cheeks, hard work in front of the mirror on your facial expressions - did their job. It will be interesting to know which TV presenter speaks the fastest?

Of course, the beautiful Tina Kandelaki is the fastest-talking presenter on Russian television. This was revealed during a survey of television viewers. They helped Tina in how to speak quickly, just by persistently practicing on her speech. According to her, various exercises that she did daily helped her cope with speech impediments. Now it’s even difficult to imagine intellectual programs that have limited time for answers without this TV presenter.