Voice

7This is the sound produced when air from the lungs passes through the vocal folds in the larynx. Voice is not always speech. Laughter, giggling, and crying are all vocalised sounds. The children use voice in the form of babbling from very early on, long before they use speech. This babbling period has been identified as being essential in the development of speech in the young child. It is in this process that the baby discovers control over the organs of speech. Proud parents might like to convince themselves that, right from the first sounds being produced, the baby is attempting to imitate the parents. However, although after a few months the baby’s babbling might be initiated or stimulated by the sound of the parent’s voice, the baby is in fact in the process of discovering the mechanism of making sounds, and not all of those sounds will later be incorporated into speech.

8There has always been some debate over the role of babbling. It was questioned whether it was part of a linguistic process or simply an expression of the development of motor skills like chewing or crying, merely ‘mouth-flapping’. The latter would lend credence to the idea that language was almost accidental in its origins. We would like to propose that, ideally, second language learning would also begin with babbling. And with pleasure! The learner would listen to the second language and imitate the language through making sounds. Of course, what was produced would risk being dismissed as nonsense. Perhaps teachers are too focused on getting learners to make sense in a language right from the beginning, rather than exploring the range of its new sounds. As we have already said, there is a strong case for the use of nonsense for pedagogical purposes, which we will be arguing for later.

Speech

9This is the means by which humans express ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and is regarded as one of the most important features of homo loquens in differentiating the species from the rest of the animal kingdom. It requires control over precisely-coordinated muscle actions in the abdomen, chest, neck and head, synchronically with cognitive development, and it takes several years before it is mastered by the growing child. An essential aspect of the process of acquiring speech in the young infant is that of assimilating the phonemes of the language. These phonemes (which are the smallest units of speech sounds, as opposed to voice sounds) have to be integrated into the child’s consciousness long before the child can start to combine the phonemes to make words. These have to be assimilated during a long period of reception before their reproduction can take place. This period of reception, which in the case of second-language learners is named by linguist and educational researcher Steven Krashen as the Silent Period (Krashen, 1982), is a fundamental part of the learning process. The child then experiences for the first time the pleasure of exercising some sort of control over their world through combining these units of speech to make language.

Language

10Language is a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. These are rules of combination of vocabulary, grammar and syntax. In language teaching, it is this formal system, in both its written and oral form, which is evaluated in order to assess the learner.

Evaluating voice

11An evaluation of voice rarely takes place in the language classroom, and its role in determining the quality of speech receives little attention. Any judgement that does take place focuses on an evaluation of pronunciation, that is to say, the way in which phonemes, the sounds of different words, are made. This is referred to linguistically as the segmental feature of the language. However, pronunciation work in English is complicated by the wide range of national and regional dialects, which have to be taken into account in determining the correctness of the sound produced. This means that work on the pronunciation of someone learning American English will be different from that of someone learning British English or Received Pronunciation.

12The poem Them and [µz] (Harrison, 1978) is a wonderful description of how his voice and language were mocked by his English teacher in his Yorkshire school. Harrison went on to read classics at university, and he obtained a degree in linguistics before becoming, as well as a poet, a translator and dramatist. His references in the poem to the voice of his teacher, the language of Shakespeare, Keats and Wordsworth, and the differences in rhyme over time and between cultures illustrate the challenges in evaluating voice.

13English teachers should understand that voice work, which they carry out with their students, will have its benefits in the learner’s first language. If learners are made aware of this, it will give them the incentive to work on their voice, and there will be a knock-on effect on the learner’s overall confidence level in vocal expression.

14We referred above to the pleasure that a young child demonstrates when playing with the sounds of the language during the period of speech acquisition and the notion of comfort related to voice for the language learner. It is this emphasis on the pleasure and comfort aspects which are sometimes missing when it comes to learning a second language. Pleasure in the production is more likely to be experienced by the speaker when they feel that their vocal quality bears some resemblance to that generally recognised as being a feature of the language they are learning. In the case of French learners of English, the complaint most often heard is that their oral production “doesn’t sound English”. Here, they are clearly talking about prosody, the suprasegmental feature of speech, which is often confused with pronunciation. However, prosody, pronunciation and voice quality are obviously closely intertwined. As Stephan Wilhelm (2019) writes:

… voice quality should be included among suprasegmental elements in so far as phonatory and articulatory settings, when conceived of as components of voice quality, fulfil a function that is superposed to that of the phonatory and articulatory components of any acoustic realisation of the English phonemes. (p. 27)

Phonatory and articulatory settings take centre stage early on in THEMPPO workshops, with a focus on breathing, beginning with posture, and exercises on the organs of articulation.

Sound

15It may seem strange to conclude a chapter which has focused on voice by making reference to sound. Surely sound should precede voice? But we bring up sound at this point in order to talk about its absence. The idiom ‘silence is golden’ is commonplace in usage, although the full form of the idiom, ‘speech is silver, silence is golden’, is less heard. But the banality of the expression should not detract from the pointedness of the observation it expresses. Susan Sontag wrote that ‘silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech’ (Sontag, 1969, p. 17). In the same vein, it is well-recognised that in musical composition the silences between notes are as important as the notes themselves. If we bring the two observations together, it would be reasonable to affirm that the silence between words is key to all spoken language. Silence, therefore, merits further discussion and will be the focus of Chapter 6.