How to improve speech and diction at home. Stage speech: features, simple exercises, effective teaching methods

Good diction clear pronunciation sounds and pleasantness are the key to success in many areas modern life. Unique speech data is very rarely given to a person by nature. However, this art can be learned at any age if you regularly perform exercises to improve diction. When you eliminate speech impediments, you will stop worrying about things and will communicate more freely in informal settings. Perhaps after this your career will take off. Remember that in any place and in any profession there are people who know how to express their thoughts in a beautiful and concise form. In this article we will provide simple but effective exercises that will help improve your speech diction.

Articulation gymnastics

We often hear about the benefits physical exercise for human health. However, few people think that the articulatory apparatus also needs constant training. By doing the exercise to improve your diction, just 10-15 minutes a day, you can achieve very good results. Start your day with this gymnastics - and very soon you will notice how stronger you are. muscular system tongue, lips and cheeks. The articulatory apparatus will become more mobile, and speech will become clearer.

“Fence” - clench your teeth and smile broadly. Hold this position for ten seconds and return to the starting position. Make sure that the upper and lower rows of teeth are clearly visible. Repeat the exercise several times.
“Tube” - without opening your teeth, stretch your lips forward. At the same time, you can drag out the sound “oo-oo-oo-oo” for ten seconds. Repeat the exercise.
“Needle” - open your mouth and extend your sharp tongue as far as possible. Hold this position for five seconds and relax your muscles. Repeat several times.
“Damn” - show your tongue to your reflection by placing it on your lower lip and making it as wide as possible. Repeat.
“Lick your lips” - relax your lower jaw and try to keep it in one position. Lick your upper lip, extending your tongue as far as possible. Repeat the same action with your lower lip.
“Swing” - touch your tongue alternately to the upper and lower lips. Perform the exercise at a slow pace and try not to move your chin.
“Hamster” - close your lips and press the inside of your tongue onto your cheek for five seconds. Repeat the manipulation with the other cheek.

Correct breathing

Few people pay attention to their posture, the frequency of inhalation and exhalation while communicating with other people. What a pity! It is these factors that play an important role in establishing a beautiful voice and clear pronunciation of words. Do the following exercise daily to improve your diction.

Exercises for inhalation and exhalation

Starting position: stand straight, place your hands on your waist and your feet shoulder-width apart. Open your lips slightly and exhale slowly, as if overcoming resistance. When you start to succeed, complicate the task. For example, while exhaling, read any quatrain. Then try this exercise in combination with walking or squats.
Return to the starting position, take a calm breath, slowly leaning forward. At the same time, pay attention to your back, which should be straight. As you exhale, begin to rise and make the “mm-mm” sound.

10 exercises to improve diction and voice tone

Lower your chin to your chest and start moving left and right. The exercise is performed slowly and without sudden movements.
Starting position: back straight, head also down. Slowly move your jaw forward and back as far as possible.
Cross your arms across your chest and slowly lean forward, making the sound “oo-oo-oo” in a low voice.
Stretch your lips into a wide smile and open your teeth. Start moving your tongue from right to left, relaxing your facial muscles.
Extend your tongue and run it along the outside of your upper and lower teeth. Repeat several times.
Extend your tongue forward so that it resembles a bowl. Repeat.
Don’t forget about the role of beautiful posture in speech delivery. Always pay attention to the position of your back. So that you understand how difficult it is, put several books on your head and walk around the room with them. Try reading a text or poem while in this position.
Read texts with a pen or pencil held in your teeth. Try to pronounce words and individual sounds as clearly as possible. Repeat this exercise every day for 15 minutes.
Read at a fast and slow pace, in a loud and quiet voice.
Make the previous exercise more difficult. Read poetry when or while walking. Make sure you don’t lose your breath and maintain intonation pauses.

Pure talk

You can practice the pronunciation of individual sounds using special rhyming phrases or phrases. They contain the same consonant several times, and you can easily learn the sounds. Do these diction exercises daily.

Useful tips on how to improve your diction and clarity of speech are given below. Start by pronouncing pure phrases at a slow pace. Pronounce each sound, pay attention to difficult combinations and check the clarity of your pronunciation. To avoid mistakes, listen to audio recordings of speakers. At the end of each workout, record yourself on a voice recorder, mark mistakes and achievements.

Tongue twisters

An exercise familiar to everyone from childhood to improve diction is a very effective tool for achieving your goal. By pronouncing difficult sounds and their combinations, you learn clear and precise pronunciation. Read the tongue twister very slowly, try to figuratively imagine the picture that the poem tells about. After this, try to increase the pace a little. Be sure to speak out loud, but if you start to get confused, then immediately return to speaking slowly. After some time, you will notice how naughty sounds will begin to be pronounced easily and naturally.

Intonation

You are making a big mistake if you think that people only perceive the information that is contained in your speech. In fact, the listener's attention is captured by the intonation with which the speaker speaks. Learn to pronounce phrases expressively by raising and lowering your voice. Only when you make emphasis and pause will the interlocutor fully appreciate your statements.

Start with the simplest exercises and gradually make them more difficult.
Use every minute of your free time to exercise. Only in this case will you be able to quickly achieve your goals.
Exercise regularly without long breaks.
Record short performances with a voice recorder or camera. Watch the videos, notice the positive changes and take into account the points that you will have to work on in the future.
Read literature on how to improve your diction. Exercises should be varied, otherwise you will quickly lose interest and give up classes.
Do not neglect the help of specialists and teachers who can offer you useful exercises to improve your diction and eliminate mistakes typical for beginners.
If you have the opportunity to enroll in acting classes, do so immediately. Classes will help you liberate your speech, movements and gestures. You will also learn expressive recitation and stop being afraid of public speaking.

Perhaps everyone knows the story of the ancient Greek philosopher Demosthenes, who, while still a child, was delighted by chance when he heard the speech of a certain speaker, and after a while he decided to use the word as his main tool.

Stuffing his mouth with pebbles, Demosthenes in motion tried to achieve a clear articulation of the passages from poems he read from memory, thereby getting rid of the flaws in his speech. Daily training brought him benefits, giving him the opportunity to become famous as the best speaker of his era.

Good diction- this is an indicator of an enlightened person, his significant dignity, which can be applied in many life situations. Writing a competent and visual text may be simple, but pronouncing it will not be so easy. Unclear speech diction can get in the way and interfere with a perfectly practiced performance.

In fact, all diction defects can be corrected if desired. How to improve your speech diction quickly? This requires regular training.

Breathing training

Shortness of breath is without any doubt a problem that we encounter even in everyday life. Diaphragm training can fix this. An excellent way to improve diction is to sing vowel sounds while exhaling. At first, breathing will last for a short time, but with constant exercise you can reach 20 seconds.

The next stage of training is correcting the pitch of the voice. You can train, practice breathing, as if blowing out the flame of a candle.

Exercises to improve diction

There are many useful exercises which can improve diction and speech clarity for short terms. Here are some of them:

Exercise No. 1. Articulation exercise.

open your mouth wide and slowly move your jaw forward and then back;
stand straight and, holding your hands on your chest, lean forward, while exhaling, say in a low voice the drawn-out vowels “o”, “u”, “y”;
with closed and open mouth, straining the tip of your tongue, alternately rest it on the right and left cheeks;
in a smile with an open mouth, run your tongue along the lower and upper teeth, and without moving your jaw, count each of them.

Exercise No. 2. Tongue twisters for the development of diction.

How to improve your diction quickly? Tongue twisters are perfect for this. They combine different sounds. Remember the woodcutters who cut down the oak trees, or the four turtles with four turtles. To improve your diction, you can pronounce tongue twisters by putting nuts in your mouth (from the movie "Carnival"). 5 tongue twisters with different consonances are enough to get rid of speech impediments.

Exercise No. 3. Listening to your voice through voice recordings.

The sound of our voice is not at all what we think it is. You need to read any poem, recording it on a voice recorder. The resulting recording needs to be listened to. Try to correct any flaws you hear next time. You need to record until you get the perfect effect.

Video - How to improve speech and diction

Regularity of repetition

For exercises to practice good diction, spend 10-15 minutes a day.

It is necessary to move on to the next task only after the previous one has been worked out quite clearly. Regular exercises will relieve you of the question of how to improve your diction and make your speech clear and intelligible.

Diction is a clear, precise, distinct pronunciation of words, phrases, and sentences. It determines the intelligibility of speech and its perception by other people. Developed diction needed in everyday life when communicating with others, for successful career growth in many areas of business, and what can we say about people whose profession requires them to have a trained speech (singers, announcers, speakers, actors, etc.).

Another question - how to develop diction - contains a deeper meaning, so we will consider several ways to comprehensively improve this skill.

Developing diction involves working on voice training and proper breathing. To do this, you can perform a number of exercises yourself:

Developing breathing. Stand straight, place your feet shoulder-width apart, place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach. Breathe slowly, feeling the air flow. You should stick your stomach forward while keeping your chest still. This is how you develop the diaphragm.
While in the same position, with a sharp movement of your nose, inhale as much as possible. more air. Hold your breath for 3-5 seconds and exhale sharply through your mouth.
Inhale as much air as possible through your mouth. As you exhale, pronounce the consonants (a, o, u, y, e, i), as if stretching them out. You will get a continuous stream of smooth transitions (“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay ing it? Try to make each letter sound loud and clear.
Keep your mouth closed at all times during this exercise. Inhale as much as possible through your nose. As you exhale, try to “moo” by drawing out the letter “m.” Make sure this action lasts for a long time and the sound is as loud as possible.
Inhale more air, and as you exhale, “growl”, pronouncing the letter “r”. It’s not a fact that it will work out the first time, but after several attempts you will see the result.

You need to practice breathing regularly. These exercises will not take more than 15-20 minutes a day (spend no more than 3 minutes to each task). Practice in front of a mirror and make sure you do it correctly. Our body doesn't always do exactly what we want it to do.

Developing diction

Simultaneously with voice training, you can develop diction and speech. Tongue twisters are best suited for these purposes. But before pronouncing them, you need to properly stretch the muscles of the tongue, face, articulatory apparatus and lips. The following exercises will help you do this:

Stick your tongue out completely, as far as possible. Then return it to its previous position. Continue performing these manipulations for 2-3 minutes.
Push your cheek with your tongue. You should kind of “prick” her. Do the same with the second cheek. Continue doing the steps for 4 minutes.
Keep your mouth closed. Start moving your tongue as if you were brushing your teeth with it. inside. Do this continuously and intensely for 3 minutes.
Stick out your tongue and do it rotational movements. Do 20 times to the right and the same number to the left.
In this exercise we develop the muscles of the lips. We stretch them into a duck shape (with a tube), then stretch out a wide smile. We alternate these movements for 2 minutes.
Puff out your cheeks. Start spinning the resulting imaginary “bubble” in a circle. Perform the action for at least 3 minutes.
Lightly bite your upper lip with your lower teeth and vice versa. Practice in front of a mirror to control yourself. The exercise lasts at least 3 minutes.
Very effective way- this is the construction of all sorts of faces. Make grimaces, bulge your eyes, stick out your tongue. Do whatever you can think of with your face, let yourself have some fun. It is better to do this in front of a mirror for 3 minutes.

It is very useful to perform these exercises before a public speech to warm up your muscles and articulation apparatus.

After warming up, you can proceed directly to tongue twisters. Here are some of the most effective:

Tycoon Yegor was sunbathing on the mountain, a magnet fell on tycoon Yegor.
There is grass in the yard, there is firewood on the grass. Don't chop wood, but drink wood.
Tell me about tongue twisters. What tongue twisters are we talking about? About tongue twisters, about tongue twisters, about my tongue twisters!
Tell me about the sausages! Which sausages? Maybe about shopping? Oh, yes, about shopping.
The transplantation of the fire hose smacked of amateurism.

To develop intelligible speech, you can use not only these tongue twisters. For diction, any that you can find will do. Say them more often, but only after warming up. There is one that has been invented, and by learning it you will definitely significantly improve your diction. You can also do it yourself.

Here are a few more effective exercises to develop diction:

Read your favorite poem, sharply emphasizing the intonation ending of each word.
Open a regular Russian dictionary. Choose the words that seem most difficult for you to pronounce. Repeat them until you can pronounce each one without difficulty.
Stand in front of the mirror and read by heart a passage from your favorite prose work. Control your pronunciation, emotionality, and facial expressions.
If tongue twisters seem too easy for you, put a few small nuts in your mouth before pronouncing them. Now speak as close to the correct pronunciation as possible.
Read an excerpt from your favorite work with your mouth closed.
If you play sports, the following exercise will suit you. Wear headphones and repeat everything that is said in the player (lyrics of a song or audio book) while running. This makes pronunciation difficult. But don't shout too loudly so as not to scare others.

It is impossible to develop competent speech by performing only the above exercises. Do you want to check how well your speech is delivered and developed? Imagine yourself in the place of your listener. Are you erudite and confident enough to want to listen to you for hours? If the answer is no, you have some work to do.

We’ve figured out how to develop diction, now let’s try to develop our speech and make it rich. Some techniques are suitable for this:

You can achieve noticeable results in the development of your diction and at the same time deliver a speech in about 3 months, taking into account everyday activities.

Stanislavsky on the development of diction

According to Stanislavsky, the word is the most concrete expression of a person’s thoughts. He talks about how to develop diction in three sections of the second volume, “The Actor’s Work on Oneself.” Below are the rules and exercises compiled based on Stanislavsky’s recommendations:

We often attend lectures, seminars, and trainings, but we simply fall asleep during them because we are bored. At the same time, the lecturer speaks clearly and understandably; he has no speech defects. The problem lies in emotional coloring. Read and speak expressively.
You need to be able to speak in different tones. The following exercise will help you develop this skill. Read the poem out loud so that one line sounds loud, the second quietly, and so on until the end of the work.
You can practice showing different emotions by reading the same phrase, but with different emotional connotations. For example, you can say the same thing with sadness, joy, despair, anger, surprise.

Diction and speech are not as difficult as learning to work with emotions.

Listen to yourself

How do you know that your diction and voice have improved and that you are working in the right direction? Of course, you need to listen to yourself. Record your speech on a voice recorder and evaluate what has changed, what you have achieved, and what still needs to be adjusted. Draw conclusions about how to develop diction specifically in your case, what to put pressure on, and what to pay less attention to.

It is advisable to evaluate the voice with a “fresh mind”, that is, several hours after speech training, having completely rested and being in good mood. Then the assessment will be more objective, and you will understand how to develop diction and avoid new mistakes. Record your voice until your pronunciation seems perfect.

We figured out how to develop your diction, how to properly train your speech and make it emotional. Practice regularly, and even at home you will be able to achieve significant results and no longer dwell on the problem that worries you - how to develop and train diction.

For people who hold leadership positions or who do a lot of public speaking by profession, it is important to have correct diction. You can correct the clarity of pronunciation by performing special exercises.

Ways to develop diction

First of all, you should identify the range of problems with which you have to fight.

If this is a specific speech defect (burr, lisp, stuttering), then the help of a specialist is needed.

Burr or lisp pronunciation can be corrected using the following methods:

the person is explained the correct position of the tongue and lips, which are responsible for the correct
playing sounds;
Next, you should train your speech apparatus, for which you need to repeat tongue twisters;
you need to constantly monitor your speech so that the defect does not return.

Such training will help you learn to pronounce sounds and pronounce words correctly. But you should be prepared that such work will require a lot of effort.

As for stuttering, the work will be more difficult. The main problem lies in the psyche.

Very often it turns out that in everyday life a person has good speech delivery, but when it comes to public speaking, the speaker begins to stutter.

If the problem is swallowing endings or unclear pronunciation of sounds when speaking quickly, you can deal with it yourself.

Speech correction is carried out as follows:

First of all, it is necessary to identify specific defects. To do this, you need to record your voice on a voice recorder. It is best to record a conversation with someone, because if you specifically read the text, then the person will not arbitrarily try to correct his mistakes in speech.
When assessing your voice, pay attention to whether you can pronounce the phrase in one breath, as well as the strength of the sound. If they are lacking, you need to work on your breathing. There is a simple exercise for this: you should take a vertical straight position, one hand rests on the stomach, and the second on the chest. Feet are placed shoulder width apart. Inhalation goes through the nose, so that the lower part chest filled with oxygen. Exhalation comes through the mouth. This exercise helps develop the diaphragm.
Needs work on
pronunciation of individual letters. Stand in front of a mirror and slowly pronounce the vowels. Pronunciation should occur while exhaling. The sound should be loud and as long as possible. You can try humming the vowels.
Tongue twisters also help develop good diction and clarity of pronunciation. But before you take them on, you should warm up your face. The most effective way is grimacing. All facial muscles, as well as lips and tongue, should be involved in this process. This procedure should last at least 10-15 minutes. A similar warm-up is necessary before every public speaking.
The emotional richness of speech is also important. To do this, you need to think through all the intonations and pauses in your speech.
Psychological comfort plays an important role for clear pronunciation. Often a person has good diction and masters his speech, but being in front of a hostile public, he begins to get lost and mumble. Tongue twisters alone will not help here. It is necessary to develop self-confidence.

Speech Exercises

As for clear articulation, it can be developed with the help of other exercises:

knead and develop facial muscles with the help of antics;
move the lower jaw up and down and left and right;
All teeth are counted using this method, but they must first be squeezed tightly;
stretch your mouth into a full smile, fully using your lips, and then gathering them into a tube;
the body leans forward, hands are folded on the chest and the sounds “u”, “o”, “a” are pronounced.

All these exercises will help develop diction, speech intelligibility and correct articulation. If you cannot cope with the problem on your own, you can always seek help from a speech therapist.

Diction is the degree of clarity in the pronunciation of sounds, syllables and words.

The development of diction and the ability to speak beautifully is necessary in everyday life, both when communicating with friends and family, and in conversations with work colleagues, business partners and clients. Very often, due to the nature of my work, I have to prepare speeches and presentations, before going to the audience I have to recite the text more than once or twice, as well as “warm up my speech”, train intonation, thereby placing emphasis in the speech.

In addition, diction exercises also intensify mental activity, giving confidence and ease in communicating with people. Even the simplest exercise - reading aloud for 10-15 minutes a day brings very favorable results.

Today there are many exercises that will help you speak beautifully and clearly. If you want to achieve significant results, then it is better to pay attention to this issue every day for 10-20 minutes.

It is not necessary to do all the exercises at once; you can choose exactly what you think is necessary. It is better to pronounce long texts in front of a mirror, so you can evaluate and adjust your speaking style. In the future, you can train by combining it with other tasks around the house or at work (if you are alone in the office).

Basic approaches for developing diction:

EXERCISE No. 1. TONG TWISTERS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF DICTION

Tongue twisters have been known to us since childhood. These are rhythmic sentences, with a set of words where a certain sound or several sounds occur frequently. Frequently speaking tongue twisters will help teach articulation the right sound Right. Regular exercise will make your speech quick and clear.

You should start with simple tongue twisters. To begin with, the tempo of pronunciation should be low, try to pronounce words and sounds clearly. Gradually the speed needs to be increased. When you achieve perfection in pronouncing simple tongue twisters, you can take on more complex structures. In addition, you can practice and change the accents of pronunciation of words in tongue twisters, either asking a question or answering with the same tongue twister. This will contribute to the development of good speech diction.

An addition to tongue twisters would be to place a barrier in the mouth to prevent proper articulation. This technique can be seen in the film “Carnival” (it is also described in many books on teaching public speaking). There the heroine uttered tongue twisters, putting nuts in her mouth. Nuts can be substituted wine cork. If you learn to clearly pronounce words with interference, then in its absence the speech apparatus will begin to work better, and diction will improve.

Our voice doesn't sound at all like we think it does. Therefore good exercise for developing diction speech defects will be corrected using dictaphone recordings. Read an excerpt from the book and then listen to the result. Note all the shortcomings and defects, and try to correct them next time. You need to record until you get the perfect result. Now this is easy to do using a computer, tablet, voice recorder or mobile phone.

EXERCISE No. 3. BREATHING TRAINING

Shortness of breath is a known problem that we face even in everyday life. And at reports or public speaking this looks unfavorable, since the sentence turns out to be intermittent, the effect of spoken words not always expressed in in full. Training the diaphragm will help get rid of this. One of the exercises for developing diction is to draw out the vowel sound as you exhale. At first, breathing will last for a few seconds, but with constant training you can reach 25 seconds. The next stage of the exercise is changing the pitch of your voice. You can also train your breathing by inflating balloons.

EXERCISE No. 4. REPEATING DIFFICULT SOUND COMBINATIONS

Using difficult-to-pronounce sound combinations, words and phrases, you can significantly improve your diction.

1. Say difficult combinations of sounds, first slowly, then faster:
Tlz, jr, vrzh, mkrtch, kpt, kft, ksht, kst, ktsch, kzhda, kkzhde, kzhdo, kzhdu, kshta, kshte, kshtu, kshto.

2. Say words with difficult consonant combinations, first slowly, then faster:

Stay awake, philosophize, postscript, cheer up, transplantation, supersonic, disheveled, counter-breakthrough, point of explosion, Protestantism, excite, over-anxious, get into the barrel, department, fire hose, supersonic, floridate, philosophize, monster, much to snore.

3. Practice pronouncing long consonants:

A) To Clara, to whom, to the throat, to tours, to Gala, to Katya, to Kyiv, to the end, to the city, distant, get involved, give, kindle, outlet, get rid of, without a fur coat, ruthless, immortality, restore, confirm, push away;
B) Top - up, leading - introduction, push - push, hold - support, drag - pull, water - introduction, litter - quarrel.

4. Work on a combination of sounds can be done in the form of a game, using onomatopoeia:

A) Hammer the nails: Gbdu! Gbdo! Gbde! Gbdy! Gbda! Gbdi! Gbde!
B) Imitate a horse's stomp: Bird! Ptko! Bird! Birds! Ptke! Birds!
C) Throw imaginary plates to your partner: Kchku! Kchko! Kchke! Kchka! Kchky! Kchki!

5. Say phrases consisting of only stressed syllables, first slowly, then quickly:

At that hour a blackbird was singing here. There was hail here that year. The oak was old. Everyone loved Peter. Instantly the club is full. The moss hid the mushroom. Grandfather has become old. Your guest took the cane. Wave splash - sparkle splash! Jump a hundred miles.