Speaker 1: Hey everybody, it's Chris Westergaard from the Language House. I'm in the center of Old Town Square in Prague. There are tons of people around here. I've got some questions for you teachers. Do you sometimes give directions but your students don't reply? Are your lessons kind of dragging on and not really engaging? Do you put a lot of time into lesson planning and gathering materials but your lessons just don't have that punch? Well, all of these could be related to your teaching voice. In this video, we're going to cover what a bad teaching voice is and how to make it right. We are about a six-minute walk away from the Language House. Let's head over to the school so I can give you these tips. Your voice is one of the most important tools that you have in the classroom. A good teaching voice can literally make or break your lessons. Trust me, I've trained thousands of teachers in my life and if a teacher has a bad teaching voice, it usually results in a bad lesson. And unfortunately, most teachers, when they first start, have a bad voice. Let me give you some examples. The mouse is a teacher who is really insecure with their role in the classroom. They oftentimes approach teaching in a kind of squeamish and skittish way. Can you hear what they're saying? Probably not. They don't really speak that much and they don't really enunciate well. They are very quiet. They don't like interacting with their students and overall, they seem to be a bit afraid. The over-explainer. This is a teacher who loves to explain everything. They will tell you what they're going to do, what they did in the past, what they're planning on doing. Now I'm going to pass this out, then we're going to go over this. After that, we're going to take this down and after those things, we're going to do this and after these things, we're going to do those things. And the problem is, is that all of this is just extra language. It doesn't help the lesson at all. It doesn't help with understanding and it really just leaves the students confused because they don't know what to pay attention to. Eventually, when the students realize that the majority of what you are saying is unnecessary, they just stop listening. The Igor. This teacher teaches with a monotone voice and they often have an air of negativity around them. They are oftentimes over apologizing for small grievances. They don't seem to be really happy at all teaching and their lessons just seem to drag on because they're not engaging at all. If you're not engaging at all, your students are going to tune out or maybe even fall asleep. The intellectual. Here's a teacher that uses words that their students simply don't understand. When you're teaching, you've got to grade your language and make sure that the words that are coming out of your mouth are words that students already know. The speed demon. This is a teacher who speaks a mile a minute. Speaking too fast or even speaking at a normal rate will set your lessons back. Your students simply will not be able to keep up and if they can't keep up, they're not going to understand anything and you're not going to be able to teach anything. Next on the list is the mumbler. Lack of articulation is a killer in the classroom. Your students need to hear the words coming out of your mouth. Last, my final one is the I-can't-stop-talking-to-myself guy. This is a teacher who loves to talk to themselves during the lesson. They are talking about how things are going well. They are talking about how things are going poorly. They're saying inside jokes of themselves and laughing to their own inside jokes that none of the other students know. The problem with this is that your students have no idea what's going on. They have no idea what you're doing and they're all really confused by everything that's happening. Woof. That's a lot. How do we make a good teacher's voice? Tip 1. Keep your TTT low. Get rid of all of that extra language. As a language teacher, you really shouldn't be speaking that much. Most of what you're doing anyway is eliciting and concept-checking your students. So all of that extra language, just throw it out the window. Tip number 2 is to get rid of all of that running commentary. Running commentary is all of those updates that you tell your students like, now I'm going to pass this out and then I'm going to write these questions on the board and after that we're going to get into groups. Get rid of it. It's better to just give basic commands. Look at the board. Sit down. Come up here. Answer these questions. There's no need to tell students what you're doing. It's simply just extra language. Tip number 3. Stop echoing. Echoing. Echoing. Echoing. This is a common thing that people do, especially teachers, is a student will say something and the teacher will echo it back. So for example, where did you go last night? I went to a party. You went to a party? That's echoing. It's unnecessary. Instead, try to just respond to what the student's saying because there's no real need, unless you're error-correcting, to constantly repeat what your students have told you. It's just extra language. It doesn't really help the lesson at all. Don't apologize all of the time. New teachers over-apologize and part of that is that we're very self-conscious about what we're doing, but if you're constantly saying you're sorry for this or you're sorry for that, you'll lose a lot of confidence with your students. It's best to simply just fix it in real time and if it's impossible to fix, over-apologizing really doesn't do anything. Most of the time, your students aren't even aware that a mistake was made until you bring it up. So try to get rid of all of that apologizing. It's unnecessary. It doesn't help you out at all. Grade your language. Use language that you know your students understand. You can't talk to your students like you would a regular person. So before you get up there and use a bunch of language that goes over your students head, you might want to write out phrases and sentences that use the most basic language possible. It doesn't mean that the language should be grammatically incorrect. It just means that it should be easy for them to digest because if you're giving directions or if you're trying to teach something and all of the words that you're using in your explanations are too difficult or if they don't know them, they're not going to be able to pick up on anything. All this does is just create a lot of anxiety in your class. Many teachers approach teaching a language like they would any other subject and you simply can't do that. Now it is normal for this to take place because when we're up in front of a group of people, we want to sound intelligent. It's normal that we want to try to use language that makes us sound good and makes us sound educated, but that is going to cause problems in the classroom because if your students don't understand the words that you're using, your lessons simply won't work. Learn to control your speed and your clarity. These things can really hurt you in the classroom and some teachers have a naturally fast voice and sometimes teachers have an issue with either volume or clarity, but really try to work on it. One thing that can be helpful is try to practice when you're alone in your apartment or somewhere and try to really speak clearly and slowly. Work on that tone. Work on that pace so that when you get up in front of the classroom, you can do it in a natural way. Oftentimes if teachers haven't practiced this and they try to do it for the first time in their class, their voice sounds strange. Give yourself a head start with this. Practice this before you actually start teaching and you'll see improvements immediately with just this alone. Put some emotion into your voice. Your voice is one of the most important tools that you have. This is going to be what engages your students. It's going to get them to focus a lot more, so really try to put a little bit of passion into it. If you speak with a monotone, it's hard to get that engaging quality across, so try it. It seems strange in the beginning because we normally don't talk like this, but you'll see that when you're with a group of students, it's really effective. Final thoughts. To those thinking that this video is a personal attack, it's not. Most teachers struggle with a few of these categories, if not all of them. The good news for all of you is that all of these things can be improved with a little bit of practice. I recommend getting to your classroom a little bit earlier and really taking the time to work on your voice. Work on the speed. Work on the clarity. Think of exactly how many words you need to say to get your point across, and work on that, again, that emotion, that engaging quality that your voice can bring. Your teaching voice is one of the most important tools that you have in your toolbox, and when you think about all of the time teachers spend working on their lessons or working on creating materials, it's really sad because your voice is such an easy thing to improve, and once you get these skills down, you'll see tremendous results. So, thanks so much again for watching the video. Let me know what you think in the comments, and let me know if it helped. I love to hear all of the feedback that you all give me. Thanks so much. Take care. I'll see you next time.