30 Days of Prosody
Take the small step of practicing 5 minutes a day for big results
Increase in Listening Skills = Increase in Speaking Skills
The stages of progress to improve speaking skills begins with awareness. You have to know what to attend to in your environment in order to store it in your memory so you can recall it. If you’ve been surrounded by native speakers of English for years but just haven’t soaked up the accent, it’s because you’ve been attending to the meaning, the what was said, instead of the delivery, the how it was said.
Attending to the exact features of prosody that are creating meaning beyond the actual words will help with understanding the speaker’s intention and feelings. That’s the reason the expression, “It’s not what you say but how you say it” exists.
If you’re not aware of how to use these features, you may be sending meanings that are different than your actual words. You can say “sure” and mean it in a positive way, but if you use a short duration and downward pitch when you say it, you’ll sound annoyed and not convey the positive meaning of that word or your intention at all.
That’s what the 30 Days of Prosody will do - increase your awareness of what to listen for in someone’s speech and identify how they are using specific speech features such as pitch, duration, loudness, and pauses to express their meaning and intentions. Identifying it in other people’s speech makes it easier to to try it in your own speech.
You don’t have to spend hours doing this. You don’t have to focus on an hour lecture to gain the benefits of focusing on prosody. In fact, that’s less productive than shorter practice sessions.