How British Conversation is Changing: Resonance, Engagement, and Social Class!
Tuesday 30th September 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (London Time)
This short course explores how British people’s everyday conversations are shifting — and why it matters! Drawing on findings from the British National Corpora (1994 vs. 2014) and my recent study British Conversation is Changing (Applied Linguistics, 2024), we will look at how people re-use and acknowledge each other’s words, a process called resonance. Resonance is a powerful marker of verbal engagement: when it’s present, speakers treat one another’s talk as meaningful; when it’s absent, conversations can feel flat or disconnected.
We will discuss how resonance has increased among middle- and upper-class speakers, especially in professions tied to education, politics, and corporate life, while it has remained stable among working-class speakers. This reflects broader societal changes linked to ideologies of inclusivity, equality, and engagement in the workplace.
The course combines accessible explanations with real conversational examples, showing how shifts in interaction style can reveal changing social values. Participants will gain tools to analyze everyday dialogue, reflect on their own conversational habits, and understand how language change is not only about new words, but about how we connect with one another.
🏷️ Price £30 (UK VAT inclusive)
🎥 Recording automatically sent to all who book (even if you cannot attend live)
▶️ Rewatch as many times as you like
📜 Certificate of attendance available
Dr Vittorio Tantucci
Vittorio Tantucci is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University and world-leading scholar in the field of Pragmatics, the study of verbal behaviour in context. His research focuses on cross-cultural and cognitive approaches to dialogue, with particular emphasis on intersubjectivity, resonance, (im)politeness, and reciprocity. He specializes in corpus-based methods and computational approaches to large datasets of real conversations to reveal how interaction changes across time, social groups, and languages.
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
Learn MoreSorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
Wednesday 29th October 2025
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
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In recent years, the music therapy profession has begun to consider the application of the neurodiversity paradigm to music therapy practice, in particular In relation to autism, and an increasing amount of literature embracing this perspective has been published. This lecture, delivered from a lived experience perspective, will provide an explanation of the key concepts around neurodiversity - particular consideration will be given to the use of the voice, both one's own but also to the neurodivergent individual’s particular ways of using language, song and vocal sounds.
Thursday 30th October 2025
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
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Most of us have little idea of HOW we speak, or what to do to make speech more muscular. Join Annie Morrison (creator of the 'Morrison Bone Prop') for this two hour session on Creative Articulation, a holistic and haptic approach to the touchings and feelings of the articulators in the dance of speech. Seeing articulation as a purely mechanical skill is detrimental to an actor's process: it is crucial to understand what language is doing on a biological level.
Tuesday 4th November 2025
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
(London Time)
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Dr Matt Allen
The belt’s got soul! This course offers a deep dive into the vocal artistry and biomechanics of R&B/soul singing, with a particular focus on the belt voice—a powerful and expressive vocal technique central to the genre. Drawing from over 80 years of stylistic evolution, the course explores how R&B/soul singing has shaped contemporary commercial music and investigates the unique vocal traits that define its sound.