Taking care of your voice

[expatinspain]

I was wondering if anyone has any tips on taking care of your voice?

I teach English to Spanish students and frequently have to do six hours of straight teaching with no break. I also have a few very badly behaved, rowdy classes who don't speak a lot of English, so I have to talk a lot and raise my voice to get their attention.

My throat is pretty sore and my voice is quite horse some nights when I get home. Any tips to overcome/manage this would be much appreciated.

Ooh yes, had months of speech therapy when I was an NQT. The main advice from therapist was to be very deliberate in breathing before speaking to the class, supporting the voice with extra breath.

She also suggested singing with a nasal voice in the car on the way to work (eg Tammy Wynette songs, sung through the nose like bad karaoke) to develop 'head voice'.

Drink your drinks cooler than boiling eg put a bit of cold water in tea. If cold drinks, don't have them too cold. Tepid water was the disappointing suggestion for the best drink.

Swallow instead of coughing to clear your throat.

Force your throat to relax when it is all tenses up by breathing out hard, trying to breathe onto your hand about six inches from your mouth. Once you get a good constant breath pressure that you can feel on your hand, try to reproduce this but without making any breathy sounds. If you can concentrate and do this, it opens your throat out and counteracts the stress on your vocal chords (or whatever).

Once your throat is relaxed, try to make a very quiet clicking noise by clicking your vocal chords together. Think it is called an 'unvoiced glottal click'. You can probably find YouTube videos these days. This apparently helps 'reset' your vocal chords and retake control of your voice.

All this advice is from 18 years ago so speech therapy may have moved on, but I used it from then on and very rarely lost my voice, or was able to get it back by doing the exercises if it started to go, so I found it helpful.

Good luck. Losing your voice can be horrible and isolating.

Stop shouting. If you need something loud get a bell or start using a non verbal cue for silence.

Thank you both. Some really great advice there 😊

I meant 'hoarse' not 🐴 in my post 😂

A raised voice should always be controlled, not a shout.
I tend to find a slightly louder volume but with a firm assertive tone is much better than sheer volume.
Decide on how you get their attention, show them and use it consistently. (This is irritating me with my new year 7s because we are 3 weeks in and they are still unsettled because they've got got the routine secure).

Agree with others on slowing down, being more deliberate with what you say, avoiding coughing to clear your throat.

Thanks MaisyPops

I developed nodules on my voice box and needed speech therapy to cure my voice. In the end I had to move to a quieter school and simply stop straining my voice. The therapist got me to tape my voice to hear how I was straining it. Drink lots of water throughout lessons. Use your glare to wait for silence before teaching. Find your natural pitch and stick to it. Use gestures or a whistle to disci0line. Find strategies that work for your context. Priorities yourself and your voice. Write more, talk less. Get pup8s to do more group work so you can talk less. Get them to do the reading aloud. I teach English and Drama and with no voice I am useless!