One of the problems with our current approach to teaching listening is that we can overdo/dose on the preparatory and post-listening activities. And we thereby run the risk of stealing time away from direct encounters with the sound substance of speech which is contained in the recordings. It is like spending most of the time […]
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 […]
Imagine a concert pianist, on stage playing a virtuoso sonata by Liszt. Wonderful patterns of notes a beautiful and moving (in all senses) soundscape of colours, major and minor keys, cascades, soft then loud, etc. etc. This is a public display of expertise which is a wonder to behold. Expert behaviour, hard earned and hard learned over […]
We like to think that making listening as real-life as possible is the best way to teach listening. But our use of ‘reality’ in the design of lessons materials is selective. We steer our lessons as close as we dare to real-life listening, and we focus on extracting meaning but we remain in denial about the realities of […]
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) […]
Cool Speech Introduction A general introduction to the prize-winning iPad app. Watch video tutorial Cool Speech Hotspots Can you catch the words in the fastest stretches of speech? Watch video tutorial Cool Speech Speed Can you judge the speed of speech? Watch video tutorial Cool Speech Rhythm Can you feel the rhythm of speech? Watch video […]
A Syllabus for Listening: Decoding is scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2018. It is for experienced teachers, course designers and textbook authors. It focuses on the information and skills required for the teaching learners how to decode the sound substance of speech. It is for people who are dissatisfied with current approaches to […]
Teacher’s Guide Teacher’s Guide for Introducing Cool Speech Click on the image to the left, and you will find instructions on how to introduce Cool Speech in a classroom or lecture theatre. You will also need the documents below. You can also see videos explaining how to use Cool Speech here. Student’s Worksheet Student’s worksheet […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 6 describes an impending revolution in speech perception research. In my last blog here I reported feeling uneasy about the nature of research in speech perception, and in particular its use of a model/assumption […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 3 features a report on recent work by Mirjam Ernestus in psycholinguistics. Mirjam Ernestus. Last year I attended a phonetics workshop at Cambridge University where the main speaker was Mirjam Ernestus. One of the […]
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 […]
In this blog I will attempt to demonstrate, using distorted orthography, the difficulties involved in learning to listen in a language in which you are not yet expert (second language learning). First, I need to tell you about Anna’s anger. Anna is a friend of mine (a very prominent professor of English) whose first language […]
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 […]
Listening Cherry 32 – The black box – Speech in Action
We still behave, as a profession, as if the secrets of learning to listen are hidden inside a black box whose mechanisms are unknowable and unteachable. Two things inside the black box seem particularly unknowable and un-teachable: (a) the messy, unruly sound substance of normal everyday speech and (b) knowledge of what our students make […]