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Home / Bay of Plenty Times

Students pay new accent lip service

By Rosie Dawson-Hewes
Bay News·
3 Apr, 2015 10:57 PM2 mins to read

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The sound of deep New Orleans drawl echoed across the grounds of Tauranga Girls' College last week.

Jade Valour, an American opera singer, vocal coach, actor and writer with 23 years' experience, visited a group of Year13 drama students to teach them how to speak in different accents.

The students will perform 4 to 8 minute excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire for their first Level 3 NCEA assessment and drama teacher Christina Cassells says to gain a merit or excellence grade, students must portray a believable, convincing character.

"So in order to do that in this play, that's set in New Orleans in the Southern States, they should be able to attempt, at least, the American accent. "

Jade is from Brooklyn, New York, and has lived here since 2008. She says learning a different accent is similar to learning a foreign language.

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"The main difference being that with a foreign language you're really learning a whole different vocabulary, but the similarity being that with an accent and a foreign language you're learning to make different sounds," she says.

Watch Jade in action:

She showed them films with different Southern accents, then taught the students a tried and true method for learning different accents, which involved listening skills and focusing on the physical shapes the mouth makes when speaking in different accents.

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Mirrors are a great tool, Jade says.

"You have tools to be able to change the sound so that when you work on an accent by yourself, if you're watching say a TV programme or a film, you can see what they're doing and be able to imitate the shapes," Jade says.

"Basically it comes down to imitation."

Jade's workshop took three hours, so also had a cheat sheet of vowels sounds, diphthongs and triphthongs (two and three sound vowel combinations) in sentences, to work with and practice over the next few weeks.

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