Many consider competent speech to be a talent that is given to a select few and is necessary only in some areas of activity. In fact, everyone should think about how to develop speech. After all, good diction makes you listen to the person speaking and trust his opinion more. In addition, such a skill often contributes to career growth, especially if performing job duties requires frequent communication with people.
Basic techniques and exercises for speech development
Below we present the most effective exercises to improve your diction. Clear speech and a well-trained voice are the result of long and hard work on oneself. Therefore, it is necessary to perform these exercises regularly, and not occasionally, because this is the only way you will make progress in the development of your speech.
Warm-up for the articulatory apparatus
Before performing any exercises aimed at developing diction, short warm-ups will help you to prepare yourself for clarity of pronunciation. One of her options is to tightly clench a pencil with your teeth and say a phrase approximately 10-15 words long. Then take out the pencil and say the same phrase again. In order not to think about choosing a text every time, you can use any poem when performing this exercise.
Exercises aimed at improving their mobility and accuracy will also help you begin to speak better and strengthen the muscles of the organs involved in the speech process. After all, these are the characteristics that are required for the development of diction and high-quality pronunciation of sounds.
As you know, the most mobile organ of articulation is the tongue. Therefore, most of gymnastics is connected with it. There are many exercises, the regular implementation of which will eliminate the need to think about the question of how to develop speech. For example, you can stick out your tongue and try to reach it first to the chin, and then to the nose. Or, as if using a brush, use smooth movements to draw lines from the teeth to the larynx.
Pronouncing phrases with artificially complicated articulation
Tongue twisters for developing diction are considered a classic training option. With their help, you can practice clearly pronouncing different consonants in a calm environment. To achieve excellent results, it is enough to devote at least 5-10 minutes to exercise every day. However, to develop good diction there is one important rule: each phrase must be pronounced at a slow, medium and very fast pace.
You can start training with the simplest sentences, which teach you to clearly pronounce one or two sounds. For example, these could be:
- There are also more complex phrases that help you understand how to learn to speak words clearly and quickly, in which the pronunciation of two or more sounds in difficult combinations is practiced:
Pronouncing tongue twisters
There are also special tongue twisters for developing diction and eliminating problems with the pronunciation of certain sounds. A good way to figure out what exactly needs to be corrected is to listen to your own speech from the outside. Once the problems have been identified, you can begin to work on developing your diction.
First you need to learn how to pronounce an isolated sound correctly. Then it is necessary to achieve differentiation in speech of similar sounds, for example, “s” and “sh” or “r” and “l”. A significant help in correcting your speech can be pronouncing special phrases, for example:
You should move on to working on the next sound only after you have achieved the correct pronunciation of the first sound.
Reading aloud
In addition to speaking tongue twisters, it is also useful to read aloud to develop diction. Recording your voice on a voice recorder can be a good incentive. Few people, having heard their speech, would not want to improve it. By reading passages from books and making audio recordings, you can practice your pronunciation until it becomes almost perfect.
How to learn to speak so that it is really pleasant and interesting to listen to you? When reading aloud, avoid monotony and change your intonation. In addition, it is worth changing the volume and speed of reading, learning to highlight the most important points with pauses. But at the same time, control your speech so that such pauses are appropriate and not too long.
Also, do not lose sight of the fact that a calm and confident voice is best perceived by others. Whether he will be like this largely depends on the mood and internal state of a person, his ability to control emotions. However, by developing diction, you can learn to speak calmly and convincingly. For example, why not imagine yourself as a politician and talk about the state of the economy in the country while sitting in front of a mirror?
Elimination of filler words
The presence in colloquial speech of the words “well”, “damn”, “like”, “as if” always negatively affects how others perceive the content of the conversation. By getting rid of parasitic words, you will become more confident in yourself and notice that your opinion will be listened to more.
Vocabulary expansion
Another important aspect that needs to be taken into account is the need for constant intellectual development and vocabulary replenishment. A well-developed person can carry on a conversation in any situation and find the right words. To become just like this, you should read more, solve crossword puzzles more often and attend various self-development trainings.
If you devote even a few minutes every day to working on improving your diction, within a few months you will begin to speak well, and your voice itself will be transformed beyond recognition. Moreover, all the efforts made will undoubtedly be rewarded over time.
Diaphragm training
In the question of how to deliver a speech, a very important aspect is the ability to control breathing. Without it, the text may be interrupted by pauses and breaths in places where this violates its meaning or worsens its emotionality. As a result, speech will become abrupt, and the meaning of what is said is perceived worse.
Therefore, one of the first exercises to develop diction should be training to develop proper breathing:
- Place your feet shoulder-width apart, straighten your spine, place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach. Inhaling through your nose, push your stomach forward. Then calmly exhale air through a small hole in your lips, returning your chest and stomach to their original position.
- To start speaking better over time, you can make the exercise more difficult. To do this, try to maintain proper breathing and at the same time walk, run in place, imitate chopping wood or sweeping the floor.
- You can improve the development of diction with the help of the following exercise. To begin, inhale calmly, and as you exhale, hold out any vowel for as long as possible. When you can hold a vowel for more than 25 seconds, try changing the tone of your voice.
Ventriloquist
Close your lips. And start actively pronouncing the text. Any.
