Teaching Tone of Voice

Teaching tone of voice to middle and high school students can be a challenge!

Updated 1/23: Why? It’s a type of nonverbal communication that most tweens and teens are not thinking about at this time in their life! Add onto that, a student with a developmental challenge, such as autism and you’ve got your work cut out for you! Students with autism do not easily understand nonverbal communication such as body language, facial expressions and tone of voice. Have you found tone of voice to be a challenge to teach and improve in your students during your speech therapy sessions? If you are looking specifically for ideas on teaching students to detect sarcasm, check out this link: Sarcasm, detection and use.

If you are interested in teaching tone of voice from the perspective of identifying tone from nonverbal communication, check out this blog post on nonverbal communication and tone of voice.

Tips on Teaching Tone of Voice:

Decide on what TYPE of Tone you are teaching.

When I am teaching tone of voice in the realm of social skills and social communication, I find it useful to break the category of tone into these three groups:

emotional tone, (you can also inclue level of interest tone here, like boredom),
sarcasm, and
informal/formal tone.

Emotional Tone: The emotion connected with the sound of your voice. We hear the tone of someone’s voice before we even hear the words they are saying. Your spouse can say the kindest words to you but if he/she uses an angry tone, that is what we hear, right?
Sarcasm: Sarcasm is when we make a joke or tease someone with the intent of making them feel badly. Sarcasm is often communicated by our facial expression and the tone of our voice. Typically, children and teens use sarcasm with their family or friend group, but it is not well-received in other groups.
Formal and Informal Tone: Some people think of a formal tone as “fancy” or polite! An informal tone is more casual. We might use a “formal” tone at a job interview, at work, or at a nice dance or dinner. An informal tone would be used with our friends and family. We choose our tone of voice depending upon where we are and who we are talking with at the time! Using a formal tone also involves the language component of using grammatically-correct sentences and specific vocabulary. With friends and family, it’s okay to use abbreviated terms, slang and non-specific vocabulary.

So your first job as an speech language pathologist or special education teacher is to decide exactly what type of tone you are working on with your students. Since I already have done blog posts on sarcasm and formal and informal tone, I am going to focus on emotional tone in this post.

2. Identify & specify your student’s therapy goals.

If your student needs to work on sarcasm, fine-tune that goal. Does the student with autism have difficulties DETECTING sarcasm in other people’s voices? Or, it is a student that over-uses sarcasm? Do you have a student that always uses an angry tone of voice even when that is not their intended message? Or, a student with autism that cannot identify the emotional tones used by others and misinterprets many situations. Perhaps your students overuse informal tone of voice and language and need some life skills lessons on appropriate work tone? Once you identify your student has a “tone” problem, specifiy the nature of the it. Then start your work during speech therapy!

3. Start with general information.

It’s rarely effective to go right to giving students specific feedback about tone. Your students with autism may not grasp all the nuances of tone and your students with mental health challenges may get defensive. Start global, educate them on tone and gradually move towards giving students specific feedback to their particular tone issue.

This video “tone of voice, what you really mean” by Accent’s Way English with Hadar” is 15 minutes long so I typically start at the beginning of the video and stop at 4:47. She states the same expression using four different types of emotional tone.

This product, “let’s talk about tone” for middle and high school students, contains specific teaching narratives on each type of tone.

4. Educate them on tone.

Your students need to understand what tone is, why it is important and how their “tone mismatch” can potentially impact them socially, academically and job-wise. Educating them establishes by-in to the therapy process! Don’t forget to include vocabulary instruction in this process.

Tone Vocabulary:

Depending upon what you are teaching, here are some vocabulary words you’ll want to review with students.

Emotion Vocabulary:

In addition to specific “tone” vocabulary, your students will also need to have some understanding and ability to identify emotions…since we are discussing “emotional tone.” Personally, I wouldn’t work on emotional tone of voice until I felt confident my student demonstrated a solid level of emotional literacy. This product, “let’s talk about emotions” for middle and high school students is both print and no print! You can use it online with digital annotation!

5. Incorporate both examples and practice.

Time to hone the listening skills of your students. Tone is a skill that needs to be heard! It also needs to be practiced. Use interactive games that help students practice using different types of tone using the same sentence to communicate vastly different emotions. In my Let’s Talk about Tone Packet for MS HS, I provide five interactive game options. A favorite is the “Say it like an angry man,” game, pictured below. Here, students take seemingly benign messages such as “that shirt looks good on you,” and say them in an angry-sounding tone. This helps hit home that it it not what you say, but how you say it that is important.

In the “change your message, change your tone” game, pictured below, students practice hearing and saying the same message in a variety of emotional tones.

6. Perspective-taking/feedback loop

Incorporate some type of perspective-taking loop into your teaching sequence. While it’s important that students hear and practice using different types of tone, it’s even more important that they hear from others about how different tones of voice make others feel! In the pictures below, students have guessed the tone of another student and completed a quick slip of paper telling how that specific tone made them feel. Don’t forget-using real photographs depicting emotions will help your students make tone and emotion connections!

Looking for strictly digital materials on Tone?

You might like my “tone of voice” bundle of BOOM cards. One deck teaches the emotional tone and the second deck, pictured below, gives a social situation and has students choose the tone they might use in this situation. Students also have the opportunity to record their practice attempts and play them back!

IEP Goals on Tone of Voice:

Have you visited my social skills IEP goal bank yet? Scroll down to the middle of the page and check out the IEP goal samples on tone of voice! Free download!