Focus points for coordination of respiration and phonation include building awareness of breathing, controlling inhalation and exhalation, continuous phonation for speaking, and relaxing for smooth onsets.

To build awareness of breathing, students should learn how to get sufficient breath support for speech. This can be achieved through exercises such as diaphragmatic breathing. To help a student new to voicing understand the kind of air expenditure required for speech, reviewing the differences between tidal breathing and speech breathing can also be beneficial.

Once students understand how air is used for speech, it is important for the student to know if their speech is being produced with insufficient air support. Too much air leads to breathiness while too little results in laryngeal tension to push out words. If phonemes at the word, phrase, or sentence levels have insufficient air, visual feedback tools, like a spectrogram or a tissue or piece of paper held in front of the mouth that should move during airflow sounds, can show this. To reduce vocal tension, consider incorporating breath relaxation exercises (e.g., smooth onset voicing) or practice less cognitively demanding speaking tasks such as sustained vowels or rote phrases (e.g., counting, ABCs, etc.). These simpler tasks can help shift focus to correct breathing technique.