Week 5 and 6

For breathing and humming, the exercises got progressively easier and more natural. There was less tension in the body during the breathing (by now, 10, 10), and the humming was more supported – made aware by the consciousness of my state of mind/body as a result of the practices done previously.

 This week, Claire went through the transcription for the tree poem in class – and corrected many mistakes that we have made. Diyana expressed concern that her transcription did not conform to what Claire has written on the board – because her pronunciation was more “American”. I suggested that perhaps it was so because in the Singapore education system, especially in EL, they seem to adopt the more British style of speaking – and so even in Standard Singapore English or Singlish pronunciation we could see more similarities with the RP/English accent.

We also brought our own passage – transcribed into IPA symbols. It was definitely nerve wrecking trying to stick to the proper enunciation according to what I have written. I’ve purposely picked a passage that I had common problems in: (i) long sentences, (ii) end ‘s’ and (iii) ‘th’ sound (which still doesn’t come naturally to me) in the form of an Aesop’s fable.  There was a conscious effort to keep the pronunciation accurate and crisp while inserting appropriate pauses between long sentences – and this was picked up by Claire – who reminded me that overdoing it was not entirely best as well. I was told to bring a more “challenging” passage for the following week as she thought it was too easy of a passage. Perhaps a more technical passage with jargon and nominalized terms such as expository texts or academic papers. This made sense, as I probably wouldn’t be reading as many stories in my career as a secondary school teacher and I should get used to reading aloud more advanced texts with words.

For the E-learning week, we were given the task of recording ourselves reading a passage, as well as to talk about ourselves in a video – I was given the feedback by Claire that my voice sounded nasal – and I should try tilting the larynx by placing the voice more towards the back of the throat, and to open my mouth further to release the sound more freely. For that week, I actually had a cold – so it was quite surprising to see that Claire has actually picked that up through even a recording! It’s scary how one’s voice can give away one’s health status.

In week 6, we attempted our vocal warmup routines. I wasn’t quite sure on what to do because it was the first time – and I only made notes regarding what I should do (e.g. First Relax, Breathe, then Hum, then warm up articulators). I think quite set a time limit to each aspect as I wanted to just see how the body would react that week; and what the voice needed that particular instance. I guess while doing individual work, everyone gets a little self conscious – and I soon found myself being the first to change into a different section of my warm up. For that week, my voice was at its normal form and I felt that it didn’t really need anything extra – because I had been talking before the class at a microteaching session – my voice was kind of warmed up already. Claire reflected that we needed to refine on our routine because many of us didn’t really use our voices in a vocal warm up. Personally, I just felt that I didn’t need as much of a warm up that week.

After which, we were introduced to the aspects of speech – pitch, intonation, pace, pauses etc. and were tasked to choose the best speaker within the group that can best demonstrate the aspect. I guess this is to check our understanding with regard to each of the aspects, as well as to train our hearing and awareness. A heightened sensitivity to other’s speech can help us in ours as well.