Image from here. Gillian Brown is someone whose work I am frequently returning to. I wrote a blog here recently. I quoted this (1990:7), and do so again: the stretches of acoustic blur often not longer permit any representation on a segment-by-segment basis She is talking about ‘private’ speech between people who know each other […]
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 […]
Hi Dharmendra, Glad you liked the post. You asked: By the way, I am not sure how ‘I woulda asked you’ be spoken. What will actually happen … between the two vowels underlined in the ‘jungle’ version? What can happen is that there will be no consonant at all at the end of ‘have’ which will exist only as an […]
Mark said If the idea is that students should learn to ignore bits that don’t matter, is there a case for focusing on them first? For example, “actually” used as a filler, and radically reduced, may become a “noise” like ahiy. We could focus on lots of examples of this word in context, with the […]
I have now reached ‘Listening Cherry’ number sixty, and this seems like a good moment to look back at the previous Cherries, and the thirty-nine non-Cherry blog posts that preceded them. And I’ll end with a summary rant, or a ranted summary of my current idée fixes. Just below is a set of four lists […]
In the 1980s I worked at 神戸大学 (Kobe University, Japan) as a teacher of English. Towards the end of my time there, I was invited to a university party hosted by the president of the university. It was for the international students who were about to return home after varying periods of study – usually […]
Image from here. One of the technical terms that I use in teacher workshops is ‘mush’. By ‘mush’ I mean the messy rush of non-prominent syllables in the stream of speech, where the sound shapes of words are so distorted, and pass by so quickly that learners find it impossible to handle. Expert and native […]
The way we teach listening is not effective. We have recipes and ingredients. But what we do in listening activities is akin to being at a cookery school where pupils are eager to learn how to cook exciting things. But they are disappointed to find that the course consists only of smelling and tasting pre-cooked […]
I have now reached ‘Listening Cherry’ number sixty, and this seems like a good moment to look back at the previous Cherries, and the thirty-nine non-Cherry blog posts that preceded them. And I’ll end with a summary rant, or a ranted summary of my current idée fixes. Just below is a set of four lists […]
My name is Richard Cauldwell, and I want to change the way we teach listening to learners of English. Currently, we teach it badly – or, to put it more bluntly, we don’t teach it at all. We test it, through listening comprehension questions. We predict, we activate schemas, we teach strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, socio-affective) […]
Our website address is: https://www.speechinaction.org. The website is owned by Richard Cauldwell. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An […]
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 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 […]
Ying’s dilemma, and squeeze zones – Speech in Action
Image from here I promised more about squeeze zones. Here it is. The reason for my fascination with listening, and for my interest in squeeze zones, comes from reading an article about a Singaporean learner called Ying. Ying is a learner who kept a diary about her experiences while she was learning to listen. She […]