Jane Hadcock, who teaches ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Colchester, Essex writes: A new rich seam of learning has opened up for my ESOL classes in the form of Phonology for Listening’s ideas for the teaching of listening. And it’s not just a dusting, it’s a veritable gold mine and ready to […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 10 argues that ‘pronunciation’ should be reserved. Image from here. It is common to use the word ‘pronunciation(s)’ to refer to the versions of words that present themselves to the listeners ears: Swan (2012) writes […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. 7 raves about a recent publication from Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald. There is so much to like and admire about Authentic Listening Resource Pack, the latest offering from Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald. […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 11 is a rant about ‘question intonation’. Image from here. We believe crazy things about speech. We believe these things, because they are in our students’ textbooks, and we are taught them in our […]
Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 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 […]
It is easy to demonstrate the fact that there is no causal link between intonational choice and attitude. However, it requires a couple of pre-requisites. The first pre-requisite is that one should be prepared to question what textbooks and teacher-training manuals tell us about speech. What they tell us is usually useful advice for speaking […]
I’m a big fan of Gillian Brown’s ‘Listening to Spoken English’ (2nd Edition, Longman, 1990) pictured above. Below are two of my favourite quotations: …the stretches of obscure acoustic blur often no longer permit representation on a segment-by-segment basis. (p. 7) By ‘obscure acoustic blur’ GB is referring to the smudginess of the stream of […]
Listening Cherrypicks is a blog where I talk about listening issues – from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherrypick 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. […]
On Tuesday 10th June I gave a British Council seminar ‘Accent and Identity: Prejudice and Insecurity’ which you can see here – I start speaking at 13:25 into the video. The presentation was and is an exploration of issues that are covered in more detail in Part 3 of my book ‘Phonology for Listening’. I assert that […]
Alice Henderson works at the University of Savoie, and has written a review of Phonology for Listening in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association – the August 2014 issue. Like Jane Setter’s review, it gives a comprehensive account of the contents of the book and ends: This book, from an author who seems genuinely interested […]
JSLP – Sinem Sonsaat | Speech in Action
Sinem Sonsaat has written a review in the first issue of a new journal, Journal of Second Language Pronunciation. Her review ends with this stunning last paragraph: This book is definitely as crucial to second language pronunciation teaching and learning as it is to listening. Currently I am teaching oral communication skills to the international teaching assistant at Iowa […]