The young have the power to dream, the old the wisdom to guide: sounding charismatic depends on which generation is listening

Oral exercises and exams are essential in classrooms, often involving evaluations by peers and/or the teacher. However, while many aspects of the students’ speech can be assessed, the focus is typically on content and format, thus overlooking students’ delivery, although it is particularly the vocal performance that, according to research, shapes the students’ future career. The aim of our line of research is to address this discrepancy between school practice and professional reality and to raise awareness of the crucial role of delivery in schools. We do this with a special emphasis on vocal performance. The first step toward this aim is to determine whether the two generational age groups of teachers (or, more generally, parents) and students differ in their assessments of what makes a vocal performance impactful and, above all, charismatic. Our paper takes this first step by examining how vocal parameters correlate in each age group with subjective ratings related to charisma. Fifty Danish 9th-graders delivered a short, video-recorded speech. A panel of 15 younger (mean 21.3 yrs) and 15 older (mean 45.7 yrs) raters evaluated the speeches using a set of descriptors. Results show notable differences in how the student and parent generations rated the 9th-graders. Younger raters found higher vocal effort variation more trustworthy, whereas older raters valued more pitch variation as more persuasive. These findings have important educational implications for designing programs that improve students’ speech effectiveness and charisma, especially in second-language contexts.