Marthea wrote:
>I've found the most > strange vowels sounds coming from my young students, which is definitely > related to their speech. I'll say sing "ah" and they sing "uh." I repeat > it correctly again and again and all I get is "uh." I know you have to hear > the sound in your brain before you can sing it. I'm not sure how to get > some of them to hear it!! Ideas?
Oh, boy, can I ever relate to that. I'm having just this problem with a student. She's not studying voice with me, but rather (spoken) English diction. She is a native of Italy, and has been in the U.S. for a year. She studied English before she came here, and speaks quite well, at least from the standpoint of vocabulary and grammar. She has a very heavy accent, though, and many people have trouble understanding her. This problem becomes even worse the more quickly she speaks, which she tends to do in both languages. Unfortunately but not suprisingly, she is not familiar with IPA.
When I can get her to slow down and pay attention to some of the sounds we have worked on, her speech improves considerably. Still, it's very painstaking work, as she does not have a good ear, and we repeat particular phonemes (more often than not, vowels that don't occur in Italian) over and over, with me saying them and then her trying to match the sound. Once we're happy with that result, we try it in the context of the word in question. At that point, we're often back to square one, as she very readily allows the shape and position of the phoneme to be altered by those preceding or following it.
The thing that has seemed to help the most is pure repetition, best achieved by taping the lessons and having her listen to them over and over again (which, thankfully, she does quite diligently). Still, with an ear that is less than discerning when it comes to matching sounds accurately, sometimes I'm concerned that she is practicing and reinforcing bad habits when I'm not around to correct her.
The other thing that has helped is that she has asked her American friends to correct her when they hear something egregiously amiss, but I'm afraid this wouldn't apply in the case of fine-tuning the speech of a native English speaker whose friends may not set the best example, either.
And if anyone can tell me how to get her to remember the sound of the "i" in "sit", I'll be eternally grateful. . .
Robin Lynne Frye Mezzo-Soprano Voice and Piano Teacher New York, New York
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