I am delighted that Phonology for Listening has been shortlisted for the ELTon for Innovation in Teacher Resources. It is the third time it has been shortlisted since its publication last April. So may be third time lucky – but the competition looks fierce: Digital Literacies – Routledge (Taylor and Francis) The Disabled Access Friendly campaign […]
L1 speakers and expert L2 speakers of English are generally not aware of the variety of soundshapes that spoken words have. L1 speakers understand meanings without realising that there is very often a big difference between the soundshapes that occur in the acoustic blur of speech and the citation soundshapes that words have. The acoustic […]
Hi Dharmendra As I said you have good ears! In my enthusiasm for the jungle, I went too far with squeezing the non-prominent syllables ‘would have asked’. I should have stuck to the task of simply demonstrating the absence of the consonant /v/ at the end of ‘would have’, but I ended up changing the […]
Image from here In the previous blog (6th September) I wondered whether we should keep separate the teaching of pronunciation and listening. I was considering the implications of Gillian Brown’s statements about the ‘obscure acoustic blur’ of speech. Here are two further quotations from her ‘Listening to Spoken English’ which seem to settle the question: […]
Congratulations to Larry Vandergrift and Christine Goh on the publication of their ‘Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action‘ They define metacognition as: ‘our ability to think about our own thinking or “cognition”, and by extension, to think about how we process information for a range of purposes and manage the way we […]
Image from here Specific rave The recordings are the star feature of this publication by Ian Badger. They are gorgeous. They come in mp3 format on a data CD, and they vary in length from 22 seconds (message on telephone answering machine) to 2 minutes 44 seconds (registering for, and starting a conference call). Being […]
Image from BBC News 8th March 2012 09:50 Like many people I viewed Apple’s presentation of the new iPad with great interest. I followed live text commentaries from both the Guardian and MacWorld. The Guardian correspondent was furious that we weren’t being told its real name, until the penny dropped that it’s real name is […]
http://rx-games.com/fat-fingers-and-touchscreen-phones/ Jeepers doing this app design is such an emotional experience. I go from scared to shy to bold to chastened to anxious to exhilarated. When the first designs came through I was very reluctant to show them around. Not because I thought they were poor, but because I had no idea what to think […]
Since June last year I have re-discovered, and read, loads of Dickens – on my iPhone. Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, and I’ve just finished Our Mutual Friend. Wow, what a writer. Recently, I also rediscovered the delights of reading Dickens in book form (!). In some great-grand-parental volumes (hardback, two columns per page, […]
It looks like a room from the film ‘The Commitments’ but in it Fiona Shaw talks about and performs T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As she performs the poem, you can follow the text which is highlighted in sync with the audio. Clicking on lines will earn you a repeat hearing/viewing, or you can navigate […]
I have spent the last month finding out about the price of building apps for the iPad, as I want to do a second edition of my first publication, ‘Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English‘. Trawling around the internet, the lowest figure I found for a simple app was 4,000 (British […]
At the end of Listening Cherry 43, I included a recording which contained six instances of the the words be able to which is given again below. My focus in this posting is on the penultimate sound shape – which contains just able on its own – where the word sounds (to my ears) close to the word evil. This […]
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 […]
April 2014 – Speech in Action
I am delighted that Firsty Group, my technology partners, have got a new website that is as beautiful as the work they have put into my iPad app Cool Speech, and the eBook version of Phonology for Listening. I am flattered also that the first image you see on landing on their home page is […]