With only five weeks to the day of our performance at the New Perspectives on Learning in the Downtown Eastside: A Community-University Conference our club has moved on to active rehearsals.  So today everyone was busy projecting and enunciating.

Tong-twisters are a great way to warm up the muscles and prepare for the long recitals.

To make sure that the actors are heard across the room, we did some projection exercises. This is a great activity for any ESL class, because it helps learners to overcome shyness and encourages them to speak louder and more clearly. To do a projection exercise, choose a shorter tong-twister to start. Try Stupid superstition! it has emotion, some sass and it is also conveniently short. Then, ask the learners to stand facing the wall and practice speaking into the wall. At this stage they need to get comfortable with the text and feel how the sound travels through space. Matt called this stage “bouncing the words off the wall”. After the learners  get comfortable, the next step is to ask them to imagine there is a person on the other side of the wall who needs to hear the tong-twister. So practice, practice, practice.

Interesting thing, once we finished the projection exercise, we all continued speaking as if we were still talking to the wall. So it really works, give it a try!