Listening to BBC Radio Drama – is the best and most enjoyable homework you can do – and very effective!
And it’s – FREE!
In a really good production, whatever the accent, the diction is superb so you can hear and understand every word – what a fun way to do some good accent brainwashing 🙂 …
Seriously, we speak as we hear and consequently it is important to expose yourself to excellent elocution and that means targeted and deliberate ‘listening’.
If you really want to improve your pitch, tone, diction, elocution, pace, musicality audibility, etc, you need to listen to voices that entrance and impress you; voices you enjoy listening to – and then little by little you will make changes for the better.
For this reason it is important to choose productions where you have a mixture of accents, but predominantly the one you wish to perfect.
Choose your BBC Radio Drama play, wisely.
If the production style, plot and characters reflect your preferences, you will hear well constructed phrases for the accent you want to learn and and this too can improve your spoken grammar.
One of my favourite BBC Radio Drama productions, is a recently dramatised version of George Elliott’s acclaimed novel Middlemarch. The interwoven stories and characters are beautifully acted. The voices are engaging and the words are clear – whatever the accent. I highly recommend it 🙂
Here is the link: Middlemarch it is about 4 hours in total – but with the BBC Sounds app it is easy to listen to, in time slots that are convenient for you.
Try pausing and imitating sometimes – that’s how I learned accents – listen and repeat!
However, I always enjoyed listening to the entirety of the show first, so I could just let the sounds permeate my subconscious – a most enjoyable sort of sound brainwashing – and it really does work.
Concentrate on the story and in the between periods just after listening, you’ll find yourself talking to yourself in the accent and grammar you have just heard – but you do need a minimum of ’30 minutes listening times’.
Here is a link to the BBC Radio Drama Home page – for your own choices.