Motivating Tones to Enhance Education: The Effects of Vocal Awareness on Teachers’ Voices

Effective classroom communication is key in shaping the learning environment and student engagement. And, it’s not just what is said, but how it’s said, that influences students. Yet, few (current or future) teachers receive education on vocal pedagogy. This study examined the impact of raising vocal awareness in teachers on their voice production through delivering a voice training program. Specifically, we explored how teacher trainees produced motivational (either soft, warm, and encouraging, or harsh, pressuring, and controlling) and neutral communications before and after the delivery of a voice program that concentrated on raising voice awareness, vocal anatomy, exercise techniques (e.g., breath control, voice modulation), and voice care. We hypothesised that trainees’ voice production would change over the course of the program and lead to more “prototypical” displays of motivational prosody (e.g., softly spoken encouraging intentions vs. harshly spoken controlling intentions). Results indicated a noticeable difference when communicating motivational intentions between pre- and post training voice samples: post training, trainees spoke more slowly and with reduced vocal effort irrespective of motivational intention, suggesting that raising vocal awareness can alter classroom communications. The results underscore the importance of vocal awareness training to create a supportive and autonomy-enhancing learning environment.