Arizio Sweeting, writing in English Australia Journal, gives an outline of the contents of the book and says Richard Cauldwell’s … Phonology for Listening sheds light on the intricate relationship between listening and pronunciation … Whilst the book will interest teachers with an enthusiasm for pronunciation, its main audience is the listening skills teacher. … […]
In the previous post, I expressed the wish that it would be nice if gap-fill exercises involved explicit exploration and discussion of the soundshapes of the words which fit in the gap. So let’s do that now. In this case, we had this extract with the underlined words gapped out: And the words be able […]
In listening classes we do not deal sufficiently well with the difficulties that students are facing, in particular their feelings about their own abilities. So in a listening class, we focus on the correct answers, praise the students who got them, and then move on to something else. But many students (a) may not have […]
This is the fortieth post of this Listening Cherry series, and it is appropriate to mark this milestone moment with a major publication: A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding. This book was published on 2nd March, and aims to provide specific items for the listening syllabus. There is no preface (although there is an introduction) […]
The way we teach listening is like insisting that travellers arrive at a destination via several stops without giving them the means of travelling. It’s like asking people to move from point to point with a map that has geographical features (hills, valleys, rivers) but with the roads tracks and trails missing. You may want […]
It took me until 1990, twelve years into my teaching career (yes, I’m well into my fourth decade now), before I realised that native speaker teachers such as myself are deaf to what is really going on in the sound substance of speech (that’s bad); that as a result we are unable to teach our […]
Last week, I was at the British Council’s ELTons awards for Innovations in English Language Teaching. The winner of the award for ‘Excellence in Course Innovation’ was Keynote of which you can see the cover of the highest level ‘Proficient’ above. I was delighted for them, as I was rooting for them. The authors Paul […]
Image from here. This post follows on from Listening Cherry 17. It continues to consider, guided by Sir Christopher Ricks’s commentary, the intonation of the final line of Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb. What will survive of us is love. Ricks writes: … If you were to stress both ‘survive’ and ‘us’, the line would […]
Image from here In my work I distinguish between three styles of speech: the Greenhouse, the Garden, and the Jungle. The Greenhouse is the domain of the citation form, where each word is presented in isolation, with all its features perfectly represented, un-interfered with by other words. The Garden is the domain of the rules […]
A blog about teaching listening in ELT. Number 12 reflects on my rant about ‘question intonation’. Image from here. Listening Cherry 11 was a rant about what ELT believes about Yes/no questions. The problem with a rant is that you close your mind to other factors which – when you are not ranting – you would carefully […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 9 discusses Michael Swan’s use of the term ‘receptive pronunciation’. Image from here. Michael Swan is a revered figure in the field of English Language Teaching. But he can also be very forthright in […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 5 describes the phoneme input approach to speech perception research. I don’t read sufficiently regularly the research into psycholinguistics of listening. Part of me feels that I should read it constantly, particularly the research into […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 2 features a productive disagreement about a transcription. A colleague visited me a short while ago, and we discussed a TED talk that I was working on. The TED talk is by Tom Wujec. […]
Mountains not Monotones – Speech in Action
Click on the image to get a pdf of my presentation at PronSIG Brighton, 8th October 2016. Teaching presentation skills: Some of my postgraduate students (Electronic and Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering) had a problem with monotonous delivery of carefully prepared speech. I devised materials using graphics, text, and sound chunks from Martin Hewings’s Cambridge […]