Self-awareness and self-consciousness

12It is important in our work to distinguish self-awareness from self-consciousness. However, there is a linguistic barrier when discussing the two states with a French audience, for both have the same translation in French. Conscience de soi is more commonly used to describe self-awareness, and the concept of self-consciousness is difficult to convey to a French learner. Absence of concept does not, of course, mean absence of experience.

13In recent times, the popularity of self-awareness programmes in management training has led to a multitude of definitions of self-awareness (Carden et al., 2022). The definition of Mary Ellen Kondrat (1999, p. 452) as ‘becoming awake to present realities, noticing one’s surroundings, and being able to name one’s perceptions, feelings and nuances of behaviour’ corresponds most closely to what is needed in the context of work on body and voice. Kondrat goes on to add, ‘[t]he self is aware of and can recognise what it is experiencing.’

14In contrast, self-consciousness is ‘the propensity to perceive and be aware of oneself not only for oneself, but also through the evaluative eyes of other individuals’ (Rochat, 2018, p. 345). ‘The evaluative eyes’ of others can easily have a negative effect. The Cambridge Dictionary (2025) defines it in simple terms by describing it as a state where the individual is ‘nervous or uncomfortable because you are worried about what people think about you or your actions’.

Focus

15The speaker must know to whom he or she is speaking. This may seem a very obvious observation, but the failure to focus on the listener is very often a cause of diminished vocal power and, consequently, of ineffective communication.

16‘Who were you speaking to?’ Very often, after listening to a presentation or a speech by a student, we ask them who they were talking to. There is always a confused reaction to this question, as though the answer were obvious. They will reply, of course, that they were talking to the class or to us, but when they are pushed further on the subject, they will very likely admit that they had no particular focus for their words. They were simply speaking the words without thinking about whom the words were intended for. This is particularly the case when the student resorts to reading notes while giving a presentation. The eyes-down reading of notes may also, in part, reflect a socio-cultural barrier which can be encountered particularly amongst students in higher education coming from different cultural origins.

17It comes almost as a revelation to the learner that there must be a focus for the spoken word. It is regarded as being sufficient to give voice to the written word. But, without a focus, the words lack energy and conviction; if these elements are absent, the meaning which the speaker wishes to convey, and the understanding that the listener is looking for, also risk being absent. Conviction is, of course, dependent on energy, and the lack or misplacement of energy is highlighted by Rodenburg in her book Power Presentation (Rodenburg, 2009), which was already mentioned in chapter 2. In this book, which is aimed at those who wish to improve their public speaking, Rodenburg identifies three circles of energy to illustrate how human energy can work, or not, to give a speaker presence.

18Inspired by her work and as a result of our experience of listening to students giving presentations, we prefer to address the problem of focus by looking at the idea of three focus zones.

Inner zone

19In the Inner Zone, the speaker is focused on themselves with everything turned inwards, both literally and metaphysically. There is a slumped posture with rounded shoulders and a depressed upper chest. The speaker has a tendency towards shuffling or fidgeting with attention directed towards the floor. Minimal eye contact exists between the speaker and the audience, and the voice of the Inner Zone speaker sounds more like a mumble or a conversation with themselves. The reinforced combination of posture and voice signals to the audience that the speaker does not want to be where they are, namely, talking to you. So, there is very little chance you will listen to them.

Outer zone

20At the other end of the spectrum is the Outer Zone speaker. There is no question of the voice not being heard when it comes out of the mouth of the Outer Zone speaker. It is the sergeant major’s voice booming out on the military parade ground for the whole world to hear. It comes out of a body in which the shoulders are pulled back, the chest and the chin stick out and up, and such is the bombastic nature of the voice that, too often, the voice is heard, but the words are not listened to. The Outer Zone speaker gives the impression that their listening is focused upon self and that they are impressed with what they hear. It is a voice which is not focused externally, and so the listener has the impression of not being addressed directly by the speaker. This description of such a speaker is perhaps a little florid and caricatural, and it is true that the Outer Zone speaker rarely displays all these qualities, but the listener will have no trouble in identifying an Outer Zone speaker because of the feeling of not being communicated with.

Engagement zone

21Between these two extremes lies the Engagement Zone speaker, this is the speaker who is the most effective as a communicator. It is the speaker who makes you feel, even when you are just one of many in an audience, that they are addressing you directly. The speaker will communicate their energy to you out of a body which looks relaxed and at ease with itself. The energy is focused, and it is focused on you. The body and the voice of the Engagement Zone speaker are harnessed in a joint act of communication.

22In our approach, we explain the idea of the three zones at the beginning of presentation work, using our own bodies to demonstrate what we are talking about. They can then be used as references in presentation work, not only for the teacher to cite in giving a critique of a presentation, but also for the students who are watching the presentation to use. In theatre work, we like to use the non-acting students as assistant directors and get them to give their observations of what they see happening.

Energy

23Here, ‘energy’ refers to corporal energy, or physical dynamics. It has an important effect on how the speaker is perceived, the quality of the voice, and consequently, on the quality of communication.

24The traditional classroom space, with its rows of chairs and desks, hardly seems propitious to the creation of energy, but it is the world in which most teachers have to operate. Nevertheless, most of them would agree that a language class without some degree of energy and enthusiasm provides a consequential obstacle to effective learning. The higher the energy level, the more efficient the body, and the greater will be the support for the voice. The learner who feels comfortable with the body and the voice will be much more receptive to working with a new language.

25So, having established that the creation of energy is of vital importance, it remains to be determined how to create that energy. Creation of energy with a class and within the classroom takes place on two levels. There is the group level in which exercises, acting in an almost subliminal way, raise the energy of the individual through enhanced group dynamism. Then, there are those exercises which focus on the individual with the specific aim of raising the self-awareness of the amount of energy they are bringing to the oral production process. Group exercises are undoubtedly much easier to assimilate into the classroom than the individually-orientated exercises.

26There is a line from an anonymous poem, made famous by American folk singer Pete Seeger in the 1960s, which goes ‘my get-up-and-go has got up and went!’ Old age was the excuse used for this disappearance of energy. The great majority of our students have no such excuse, and yet we are so often aware of the lack of ‘oomph’ which they bring to the classroom. Too many years of being conditioned by a passive regime of language learning, in which they will only get the opportunity to speak if spoken to (and in a class of thirty or more pupils, that is not very often), has ensured that they are far from having the enthusiasm and energy necessary to make them proactive participants in the language learning environment.

27Yet it is this proactivity, in which the learner takes conscious control of the communicational environment, whether it be conversational or presentational, that is the very feature of language use which we wish to encourage in our students. It is perhaps the acquiescence of students in the language teaching process which teachers find one of the most frustrating aspects of the classroom environment. So, the challenge for the teacher is how to bring energy to an activity whose lack of vitality is often revealed by the acoustic drone which emanates from the language classroom. Without energy, the voice is just a background noise, and we often learn to live with a background noise without paying any attention to it.

Focusing on the body

28Before turning our attention to the voice, it is very important to focus on the body. The correlation between body alertness and vocal quality cannot be overemphasised, and body alertness is not something which just happens; it has to be worked on. Any sportsman follows a strict warm-up routine before engaging in a sporting activity. The voice, to be effective, demands that a similar warm-up routine be observed.

29It is important that the exercises which follow are introduced in the very first session with a new group, along with an explanation as to why they are being done. The reason for this is that there will inevitably be some initial resistance to such exercises, and the reorientation of the yardstick by which students are going to have their language skills measured must be made clear. Language learners have been conditioned, through the emphasis on grammar exercises and rote-learning, to reach their own understanding of what a language class is all about. Anything outside their own terms of reference risks being treated with suspicion at best, rejection at worst. Such an approach also demands a high-level energy input from the teacher. There will inevitably be groans on reading those words from teachers who feel that language teaching is already draining enough on their reserves of energy. But as a counter to that, we would argue that raising the level of energy in the language class will ultimately be less exhausting for teachers. We all know how enervating it can be trying to motivate students who appear to soak up everything which is handed to them without giving back anything in return. With increased levels of energy-stimulating input from students, activities suddenly seem more pleasurable and less exhausting for both learner and teacher.

Emotion

30The word ‘emotion’ is one that teachers may shy away from, identifying it with primary emotions such as fear, anger and disgust, or the secondary or social emotions such as jealousy and embarrassment, manifested by shouting in anger, crying with despair, laughing hysterically, etc. The teacher may say, quite rightly, that such emotions are okay for the professional actor to play around with but can be too hot to handle in the classroom. This is the point at which to bring in another word, which is often used as a synonym for emotion, and that is “feeling”. Damasio distinguishes between emotion and feeling by saying that ‘Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind’ (Damasio, 2003, p. 28).

31Emotion is used here in the sense of “feeling”. It brings colour and relief to language. With emotion, the speaker is heard to identify with what he or she is talking about. Inserting an emotional awareness in the second language classroom allows learners to explore the link between speech and feelings and to experience how playing with emotion will change their prosody and the quality of oral production. Such approaches, although they remain rather rare, tend to arouse more interest, as shown in an article by Eschenauer et al. (2023). In this article, the members of the CELAVIE project show an integrative model of what they have identified as three major components of oral communication, which are interconnected: creativity, oral production and cognitive emotional skills (p. 3). Embodied language stands at the core of this model, its creators stating that ‘A motivating and innovative task such as a drama-based performance in a school context could evolve emotional awareness and creative engagement for the development of communicative skills in EFL’ (2023, p. 4).

Liberation

32The ultimate aim in the work of THEMPPO, as has already been stated, is to free up the body, offering vocal access to appropriate prosody. This liberation of the voice comes through liberation of the body. In the books written on voice coaching in English, of which there is no shortage, the word ‘liberation’ or one of its synonyms frequently occurs along with the idea of finding the voice. It is reflected in such titles as Freeing the Natural Voice (Linklater, 2006) and Set Your Voice Free (Frazier & Love, 2016), to mention but two examples. They are based on the idea that within all of us there is another voice waiting to be released. That is the carrot that we like to hold out to our students—that they are capable of speaking with another voice.

33The classroom is a demanding place. Learning is not to be taken lightly. There are tasks to be done, goals to be reached, grades to be achieved. Let’s get serious! But maybe getting serious in the case of voice work in the language class means that we need to lighten up. Of course, language teachers already know that fun is an essential part of language teaching and use games, videos, physical objects, etc. to bring the classroom alive. These are, of course, essential activities and fun—but controlled fun.

A time to be silly

34There is another type of fun, of a sillier, more anarchic style. Silliness? Anarchy? In the classroom? It does not sound like a very sensible idea, does it? Things might get out of control. All teachers fear losing control in a classroom situation. Silliness among students can be a very annoying thing and something not to be encouraged. Except when we come to voice.

35We have already spoken about posture, and when we talk silliness, we can think of corporal silliness—think of the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch—as a prelude to working on posture. Regarding vocal silliness, we think of giggling. Giggling can, of course, be very annoying, but in its silent version, it can be a great exercise for working on the role of the stomach muscles in voice production.

36But silliness is so much more than strange walks and giggling. Its major asset in work on the voice (and we insist that it is an asset) is that it stimulates the notion of playing with the voice. It encourages the voice to do things that the voice normally does not do.

Gurning

37Is there anything sillier than gurning? The original meaning of ‘to gurn’ meant to snarl like a dog or to look savage. Nowadays, it is much more about looking funny than looking intimidating. This activity, in which the individual tries to create the silliest, ugliest expressions with the face, has been elevated to the level of a world competition, taking place at the annual Egremont Crab Fair in the north of England. In the summer of 2019, the Royal Mail issued a stamp celebrating gurning. So, what is its place in work on the voice? Well, in work on the articulators, it is very important to free up the mask of the face.

38We all wear a mask which we show to the world. And we all know people whose mask never changes. They never smile, never raise their eyebrows or purse their lips. They wear a fixed expression—at least when they greet the outside world. Whether they wear that expression all the time, in the privacy of their own home, can be left to speculation. We begin nearly all work on freeing the mask with a minute or two of gurning.

Nonsense

39The confirmation that nonsense plays such an important contribution to the English language is that there are so many synonyms for the word itself. Over eighty can be found on one website, which is dedicated to spreading ‘the joy of the English language in all its variety through time and space’ (Chrisomalis, 1996), and the list is probably not exhaustive. So, what is liberating about nonsense, and why do we think it is important in voice work?

40Nonsense has the great advantage of deflecting attention away from content. Too often, it is content, the meaning of the words being spoken, which gets in the way of the form, the sound of those words. Sound is both acoustic—that which we hear when we speak—and sensory—that which we feel. When speaking words like ‘bambosh’ or ‘fadoodle’, most first-language English speakers will experience a pleasant sensory perception, which is absent when speaking the word ‘rubbish’, a synonym of the two words. The use of nonsense words has found its place in research work into the emotional quality of human speech sounds (Myers et al., 2013). A consistent finding in this research was that words consisting of phonemes which are articulated towards the front of the mouth are perceived as being lighter and more pleasant than nonsense words articulated at the back of the mouth (p. 1106).

41At the same time as using the AFFEL-FOR, there is, it seems to us, a case for teachers devoting more time to talking with their learners about the nature of mother tongue acquisition. Time spent doing this will facilitate the incorporation of body and voice activities into work in the language class, providing a response to doubting learners when confronted with exercises which seem to be a long way removed from those of a typical language class.