Prevention of voice problems in teachers.

The goal of this study is to determine the effect of a voice training program on the voice quality in future teachers. The four parts of an existing training program "test - theory - training - transfer" will be adjusted to the needs of a teaching voice and to the implementation in teacher education.
In order to involve the teacher trainees in the test phase, they are trained to evaluate voice quality in teacher students in order to detect voice problems. The results of this perceptual training are compared to the results of experts (speech therapists) and of a control group of teacher trainees that received no perceptual training. This study enables us to determine the effect of this training and clarifies the possibility of an active involvement of the teacher trainees in the test phase. In the second part of this study the effect of the adapted "theory and training" phase is investigated. We aim to test a group of 50 students of the teacher education of EhB and 50 students of the teacher education of the VUB are involved. The theory group receives a theoretical lecture for three hours; the trained group receives three hours of theory and six hours of training and the control group receives nor theory nor training. The comparison of the results of the three groups demonstrates the effect of each phase. This research will show whether or not the voice training module has impact on the teaching voice.