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The SegSylPro Approach to Opera Lyric Diction Instruction in a Young Artists Program

Operatic lyric diction pedagogy, a sub-field of pronunciation pedagogy, is a niche field within the broad discipline of language learning. As language learners, opera singers are atypical in that they are "pronunciation learners" who, while singing unamplified over an orchestra in a large theatre, need to be understood (intelligibility), with ease (comprehensibility) by the audience while passing (Piller, 2002) as members of the L1 community they are portraying (Derwing & Munro, 2005, p. 385). Another factor differentiating opera singers from typical language learners is that they never need to produce spontaneous, non-L1 language in that their texts are pre-scripted, poetically structured, grammatically correct, and heavily rehearsed. 

A lyric diction instructor's job is to enable an opera singer to look and sound as if they were born and raised in a country to which they may never have been in a language they may not speak. To enable and expedite this process, I have designed and developed The Steven Leigh Lyric Diction Pedagogical System (SLLDPS), the world's first pedagogical system. SLLDPS amalgamates my professional careers as an opera singer and language diction coach with my educational backgrounds in music, language acquisition, pedagogy, dialectology, linguistics and phonetics. As a comprehensive system, SLLDPS is comprised of a method (SegSylPro), an empirically tested pedagogical framework (The Seven Point Circle) and code of ethics governing the learner-centred pedagogy ensuring accountability to both the student and the employer (The Twelve Principles). This presentation will discuss SLLDPS which I will be empirically testing for my Ph.D. dissertation.