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 […]
In the autumn of 2016, Jungle Listening: Survival Tips for Fast Speech was piloted at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc in the South East of France. It was used with postgraduate students of psychology, on a course taught by Alice Henderson and Frédérique Freund. Alice was more familiar with my approach to listening than Frédérique. After the […]
Evidence from spontaneous speech Spontaneous speech is not as tidy as the clear careful speech that we use to teach pronunciation to learners of English. But the unruliness, speeds, and messiness have to be mastered if learners are to become expert listeners to English. I believe it is vital that recordings should be used as […]
Phonology for Listening is a textbook for all teachers of English. It takes the plight of the learner-listener as its starting point. It is getting rave reviews (which you can read here) and it has been shortlisted for two prizes: the English Speaking Union’s English Language Book Award (2103) and the Ben Warren-International House Trust […]
Would have asked … woulda asst – Speech in Action
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 […]