Developing The Way We Talk
(paralinguistic skills)

The aim of this work is to enable the children to develop an awareness of their paralinguistic skills and how altering them can affect the meaning behind what is said.

The five aspects that need to be considered are: volume, rate, intonation, clarity and fluency. This summary of the 5 aspects is taken from Talkabout for Teenagers (due 2009)

	Volume We tend to speak louder when we're angry or excited and quietly when we're sad or bored. Did you know? We think people who speak quietly are less confident than people with louder voices.
	Intonation How much our voices go up and down will tell you how happy or sad someone is. Did you know? We think people with varied intonation are more interesting than people with a flat intonation.
	Rate We tend to speak faster when we're angry or nervous and slower when we're sad or bored. Did you know? We think people with very slow speech are less interesting than people with a faster rate.
	Clarity We often mumble when we're nervous or bored and speak clearly when we're happy. Did you know? We think people who speak clearly are more confident than people who mumble.
	Fluency We tend to use lots of 'fillers' like 'ums', 'ers' and 'you know' when we're nervous and we speak more fluently when we're happy or angry. Did you know? We think people who speak fluently are more confident than those who use lots of fillers.

Here are a few activities that you can do to help develop this awareness:

How are they talking?

I often introduce this topic by using Scenario 17 of the Talkabout DVD which has 5 clips demonstrating 5 people talking in different ways.

If you don't have this DVD, maybe you could model inappropriate rate, intonation, volume, clarity and fluency yourself and see if the children can correctly identify what is going on with your speech.

Emotional talk

This is an exercise taken from Talkabout for Teenagers (due 2009). Use the 4 emotion cards below and the following sentences and ask the children to pick one emotion and then to say it in the manner of the emotion.

Sentences:

Can the other children guess how they are feeling? What happened to their voice?

How do we sound when we're…

The children think about things they might say when they're feeling sad / angry / happy etc. The whole group takes it in turns to say the sentence(s) and these can be recorded and played back to the group.

What happens to our speech when we say these different sentences?

For example, we may notice that when we're sad …

 

• We speak slowly
• We speak quietly
• We stumble over our words
• We speak in a monotone
• We are not very clear

Balancing our voices

For older children you may choose to use a graphic equaliser like below to help them assess the way we talk in different situations. This activity is taken from Talkabout for Teenagers (due 2009)

Stressed Eric

Cards are prepared with a sentence written on them. Students are then asked to read them but to emphasise different words. What happens to the meaning?

This exercise is taken from Talkabout Activities (2003).

So hopefully that has given you a few ideas on how you could tackle teaching children all about the way we talk.

In the next issue, I will think about conversational skills.

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz

Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.