Knight-Thompson Speechwork for Actors: What It Is and How to Start

You get a note in tech: “I’m losing the ends of your lines.” Or a callback asks for the scene in a Dublin accent, by Thursday. Or a speech teacher once told you your vowels were “wrong,” and you’ve been quietly fixing them ever since, without being sure what you were fixing them toward.

Knight-Thompson Speechwork, usually shortened to KTS, was built for exactly these moments. Its organization calls it “a skills-based approach to speech and accent training for actors.” The key word is skills. Instead of handing you one correct way to sound, it trains you to feel and control the physical actions that make speech, so you can be clear in a big house, and shift to another accent when a part needs it.

The short version: KTS starts with your body (breath, tongue, lips, jaw, soft palate), explores before it explains, treats being understood as something you work out with your listener, and breaks accents into four parts. You can learn its ideas from three books and a ladder of workshops, and you can start exploring on your own tonight, as long as you treat the exercises below as play, not drills.

Where Knight-Thompson Speechwork came from

The method is named for two teachers at the University of California, Irvine. Philip Thompson’s UCI faculty page says he co-founded Knight-Thompson Speechwork in 2002 with his mentor, Dudley Knight, and that the approach now has more than 50 certified teachers. The KTS site dates their first workshop to 2002 as well, held to introduce the work to speech teachers, and its first teacher certification course to 2012.

Knight was also a voice teacher. In a tribute written after his death in 2013, Paul Meier, founder of the International Dialects of English Archive, notes that Knight taught at UC Irvine for twenty years and was a Master Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework, and describes KTS as Knight’s modified version of the Fitzmaurice technique. If breath and voice are where you want to begin, our guide to Fitzmaurice voicework covers that side.

Three books carry the method. Knight’s own Speaking With Skill: An Introduction to Knight-Thompson Speech Work came out from Methuen Drama in 2012. Routledge publishes the two newer guides: Experiencing Speech, a beginner’s book by Andrea Caban, Julie Foh, and Jeffrey Parker, now in a second edition; and Experiencing Accents (2024), by Thompson, Tyler Seiple, and Caban.

The ideas behind it, in plain words

The KTS site lists a handful of principles. Four of them change how an actor works day to day.

Exploration first. “Description precedes prescription,” the site says. You find out what you actually do before anyone tells you what to do. The training is developmental, too: you start with anatomy and feel each speech action in your own mouth, and you only learn the phonetic symbols for an action once you’ve felt it. That mirrors how you learned your first language, by doing it long before you could explain it.

Play is the method. The site treats play as a main way people build skills, not a warm-up you get through before the real work. So a lot of the work looks like games: odd sounds made on purpose, to find out what your mouth can do.

Rigor, all the way down. Play doesn’t mean loose. KTS uses the full International Phonetic Alphabet, the symbols for sounds in any language, not only English, and aims at narrow transcription, which records fine details of how one person actually said something.

Intelligibility is the target, and it moves. For KTS, the first goal of an actor’s speech is to be understood. But the site calls that “a constantly negotiated process between speaker and listener,” not one fixed accent. A large theater, a close-up, and a radio play need different amounts of precision. You learn which speech features help the listener, and you adjust.

Detail and fluency

That adjustment has a name in the work: detail. Every sound is an action, and you can put more or less precision and energy into it. More detail usually means more clarity, and it often costs some fluency, the easy, connected flow of natural talk. The final part of Experiencing Speech, titled “Speechwork Is Acting Work,” puts linguistic detail and fluency right next to circumstances and acting choices. How carefully a character speaks is a choice about who they are.

How KTS differs from Standard American stage speech

Traditional American actor training often taught one model accent for the stage, and Edith Skinner is the name most actors know. In a KTS blog post on the method’s roots, Erik Singer describes that traditional model as drilling a supposedly neutral “standard” with maximum detail in every context, and he argues it ignores context and can leave actors stuck playing a narrow range of parts.

KTS takes a different route. It teaches the skills under an accent (phonetics, anatomy, listening) rather than an accent itself. Singer’s argument rests on linguistics, not only taste. In an earlier post he puts it bluntly: “Linguistically speaking, ‘standard’ English isn’t the center of anything.” The publisher’s page for Experiencing Accents goes the same way: the book sets out to dismantle the idea that “accents exist on a spectrum of good and bad.”

His post on the roots tells a useful cautionary tale. Knight first called his set of clarity skills the “Detail Model.” Some teachers then turned those skills, set to high levels, into a new prescribed “Detailed” accent, which Singer says was exactly what Knight had hoped to avoid. Knight’s book dropped the name. The lesson for you: detail is a dial, not a destination.

None of this means you have to pick a side. CalArts’ BFA speech course, for one, builds on Skinner’s Classic American Stage Speech and works with the phonetic alphabet through KTS in the same class. If a director or school asks for a particular stage standard, KTS treats that as one more accent you can learn on purpose.

How KTS handles accents: the Four Ps

KTS breaks every accent into four parts. The publisher’s description of Experiencing Accents says each one is investigated and practiced separately, then combined in performance. The book runs as fifteen modules, built for a semester but aimed at working actors too.

• People: the cultural, historical, and geographic context of the accent, so you’re playing real people rather than a sound effect.
• Prosody: the music, meaning rhythm, melody, and where the stress falls.
• Posture: the shape your vocal tract tends to hold while you speak, where the tongue rests and how the lips and jaw sit.
• Pronunciation: which sounds the accent uses, and separately, where in words those sounds turn up.

Posture is the one most actors haven’t met before. The KTS site calls it a powerful way to change an accent, and it often gives you the felt sense of the accent that the other three hang on. Our step-by-step guide on how to learn an accent for acting walks through researching speakers and making a sound-change list, which is where pronunciation work starts.

Five solo explorations to start with

A KTS class, led by a certified teacher, is the real thing. These five explorations are our own starting points, built on the principles above, so you can get a feel for the approach at home. Go slowly, stay curious, and stop if anything strains.

1. Find your articulators in slow motion

Say a short word, like pigeon, at a tenth of normal speed. Notice what touches what: lips meeting for the p, the front of the tongue lifting to the roof of your mouth for the sound spelled g, the tongue tip touching the ridge behind your top teeth for the n. Try it silently, then whispered, then voiced. You’re describing what happens, not judging it.

2. Invent a language

KTS uses an exercise called Omnish, speaking what the site calls “a fictitious improvised language” while drawing on every speech action you can find and meaning what you say. Try a solo version: talk nonsense for a minute about something real, like your day, using clicks, trills, sounds from the back of the throat, and sounds you can’t name. Then try to tell the same story without repeating a sound. It frees the mouth, and it keeps sound tied to communication.

3. Turn the detail dial

Take one line and say it three ways: as loose and connected as you’d say it to a friend, as precise as you can make every sound, and somewhere between. Then imagine the space you’ll play in and pick the level that lets the back row follow without sounding like a lecture. For targeted drills on dropped endings, see our diction exercises for actors.

4. Try on a posture

Speak a sentence while holding a different setup: lips more rounded, then spread; tongue resting further back, then further forward; jaw more closed, then more open. Don’t aim for an accent yet. Notice how each setup changes the whole sound, and how it changes your sense of who might be speaking.

5. Describe before you prescribe

Record yourself saying a few lines in your own accent. Play it back and write down what you actually do on three or four words, in plain words or in phonetic symbols if you know them. This is the habit at the heart of the method: an accurate picture of your own speech comes before any change.

Try it on a speech: Higgins and the flower girl

Shaw’s Pygmalion is a play about a phonetics professor who judges people by their vowels, which makes it a neat place to practice an approach that refuses to. In the first act, Higgins (still listed as the Note Taker) turns on Eliza.

THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

THE FLOWER GIRL [quite overwhelmed, and looking up at him in mingled wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her head] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo!

THE NOTE TAKER [whipping out his book] Heavens! what a sound! [He writes; then holds out the book and reads, reproducing her vowels exactly] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—ow—oo!

Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Act I, from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text (the spelling “Shakespear” is Shaw’s). You can read the whole play on our Pygmalion page.

Notice that the stage direction asks Higgins to reproduce her vowels exactly, yet his version adds an extra “ow.” Even the expert describes imperfectly, and he draws the wrong conclusion from what he hears. Here’s how to use the scene:

1. Say Higgins’s speech in your own accent with low detail, then with high detail. Decide which level fits a man who lectures strangers in the street.
2. Find the hard clusters (“depressing and disgusting,” “articulate speech”) and run them in slow motion, as in the first exploration.
3. Try his speech in three postures and notice which one makes the contempt land without pushing.
4. For the Flower Girl, treat her sounds as precise actions, not noise. Say them slowly, then say the Note Taker’s version and notice the difference.
5. Run the exchange plainly, keeping only the choices that helped.

Take it from the exercise into the scene

Speech choices that hold up alone can fall apart once you have to listen and answer. So test them with your cues. Offbook reads every other character in a realistic voice, listens while you say your lines, and plays the next cue when you finish, so you can run a scene again and again and hear whether your detail level and posture survive the back-and-forth.

Get the words solid first, because it’s hard to attend to the tongue while you’re still hunting for the next phrase. Offbook can hide your lines while everyone else’s stay visible, and our free first-letter memorizer turns any speech into first-letter cues. Once the text runs on its own, your attention is free for the speech actions.

And keep the play. If a session turns into anxious correcting, go back to the invented language for a minute. KTS is built on the idea that you learned to speak by playing, and that you keep learning the same way.

How to study KTS properly

When you want more than solo play, the KTS workshops page lays out the ladder. Experiencing Speech is the introductory workshop and has no prerequisites. A Phonetics Intensive follows, then Experiencing Accents, and the teacher certification program asks for all three. The site suggests taking them one at a time, with practice in between. Their workshops have drawn actors, speech-language pathologists, linguists, dialect coaches, and voice and speech teachers.

If you’re starting with books, begin with Experiencing Speech, which is written as a beginner’s guide, and move to Experiencing Accents when you have an accent role or want a system for one. Thompson’s UCI page says certified KTS teachers work in training programs across the country and around the world, so a voice and speech class near you may already use it. Our guide to Linklater voice work is a good companion if you want breath and voice training alongside.

Questions actors ask

Is Knight-Thompson Speechwork only for accents?

No. Accents are one strand. The foundation is general speech skill: feeling the actions of speech, hearing them accurately, writing them down, and adjusting clarity for the space you’re in. You can use it simply to be understood in any space, without a one-size-fits-all stage accent.

Will KTS take away my own accent?

That isn’t its aim. KTS doesn’t treat any accent as the correct one, and its goal for speech is intelligibility, worked out between you and your listener. You keep your own speech and add the skill to change it when a role or a room calls for it.

Do I need to learn the IPA?

Eventually, yes, if you study the method fully: it uses the whole International Phonetic Alphabet and narrow transcription. But the symbols come after you’ve felt the actions, so you can start the physical explorations without knowing a single one.

Can I learn KTS from a book alone?

You can learn a lot, and the books are full of exercises. But this is detailed listening work, and a certified teacher hears things in your speech that you can’t yet. A good plan is to read and explore on your own, then take the introductory workshop or a class when you can.