The petrified pedagogy of speech delivery: reexamining the Canon of speech delivery through the lens of nonverbal communication research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Speech delivery pedagogy has both changed dramatically over the last several centuries and remained remarkably fixed over the last 100 years. In the early 1900s, this pedagogy underwent a dramatic shift from an “elocutionist approach” to a “natural approach” to speech delivery. Since that time, speech delivery pedagogy has remained in an essentially petrified state while our understanding of nonverbal behaviors – the very behaviors at the heart of speech delivery – has grown exponentially. In this essay, we draw upon the expansive nonverbal communication literature to argue for a new approach to teaching speech delivery – an approach we refer to as the interconnected approach. This interconnected approach re-emphasizes the importance of speech delivery, structures the topic of speech delivery around coherent nonverbal clusters, and acknowledges the unnatural pathway to developing a natural speech delivery.