Vocal Clarity Through Drama Strategy

Theatre based voice training techniques have been associated with actors and singers mostly. However, they can also help benefit second language learners. This paper aims to describe theatre based voice training techniques and investigates the effect of these techniques on learners’ vocal skills. Following three theatre based voice training sessions, Turkish learners of L2 English (N=40) were found to score higher in the oral prosody scale (Zutell and Rasisnki, 1991) compared to the pre-test. It is concluded that contributing to freedom in the voice and reducing inhibitions of the learner and enabling the learner to experiment with the prosodic aspects of the target language, theatre based voice training activities can be employed in language teaching.