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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Podcasting for E-Learning: Inflecting the voice

In yesterday's post, I discussed the importance of narrative pace to audio podcasting. In the article, I suggested that a good rule of thumb to follow is:

Allow enough time to each learning point for it to be well understood. Then move on.

However, pace alone is not enough to encourage listener engagement with your podcast. Working in symphony with it are the three "other" 'P's' - pitch, projection, and pausing.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a newly-accredited Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) instructor. She loves the job and working with her students, but she mentioned a particular frustration that occurred regularly: the substantial number of homonyms and homophones in English. She told me that her students couldn't understand why "bow" /baʊ/ (-vb. to bend the knee or body or incline the head, as in reverence, submission, salutation, recognition, or acknowledgment) could also be a noun, and was pronounced like "bough" /bou/ (-n. a tree branch, especially a large or main branch), while at the same time was spelled like /boʊ/ (-n. a bend or curve, a flexible strip of wood or other material, bent by a string stretched between its ends, for shooting arrows).

The reason for this is of course that the English language is what Stephen Fry calls "a mongrel mouthful." The language is fundamentally based upon an aggregation of Jutland Danish-Frisian and Lower Saxon dialects, heavily influenced by the Romance language (mainly French,vo1 Latin, and Greek) and thousands of borrowed words from all points of of the former British territories (and beyond), not to mention a grammar structure that's a mystery to many people, including native speakers of the language.

It does neatly highlight the importance of context in any verbal communication, something that's even more necessary when communicating in audio only, when we do not have the visual and other cues we typically use to elucidate precise meaning. Equally, it emphasizes the point that we, as content authors and producers, can never assume that a word has one meaning. If you think that will be any confusion, change a word for a synonym: for example, if you're talking about the secret life of the forest, say "branch" rather than "bough" if you think that your listeners could misinterpret the word or the usage; they usually don't have the benefit of a script in front of them as a reference or to check the meaning.

So, the second heuristic for writing content for podcasts is:

Anticipate how your audience could interpret a word and understand how it might affect interpretation of your meaning.

The right emphasis can be achieved by using the Four P's. According to Steve Ahern in Making Radio (2006):

The whole sense and emotional feeling of a phrase can be changed by simply changing the way we stress words.

(p.73)

Take the phrase "How are you?"

How are you? is a common pleasant greeting
How are you? can represent a concern on the part of the inquirer
How are you? shows interest in the other person

In most western languages (it's different for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese) voice pitch - or inflection - is used to trigger certain responses in the listener. The High Rising Terminal in declarative questions ("Did you find the CD?") is an obvious example. Similarly, a downward inflection at the end of a word, phrase, sentence or paragraph communicates authority and command over the facts ("The airships never flew again").

Try this yourself by saying the following phrase, first with an upward inflection, and then by pitching your voice down at the end of the statement:

"This is a good podcast?"

"This is a good podcast."

Between these two extremes is the steady tone, which is used to keep your audience's attention. Aim to keep your inflection and pace steady, and to flow smoothly between phrases and sentences. However, be careful not to fall into monotonous delivery - what my good lady wife Mrs. E-Learning Curve calls a "robot voice."

To counter a dull and uninteresting delivery, it's useful to inflect key words or phrases in a sentence. By emphasizing the right word you will enhance the meaning of the sentence and increase its effectiveness.

More...

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References:

Ahern, S. (2006). Making Radio: A Practical Guide to Working in Radio. Allen & Unwin

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