Difficulties in listening to Spoken English
ESSAY TITLE: The importance attached to pronunciation today is reflected in the inclusion in the majority of course books of carefully planned and systematic pronunciation and sound-practice material. Nevertheless, many learners have difficulty understanding, or making themselves understood by, anyone other than a language teacher. What are the major causes of learners' inability to communicate effectively in oral situations? How should teaching programmes be devised to counteract this?
[Question set on David Jones' RSA Course in Stockholm, 1982. An answer follows in essay form.]
Use "slow colloquial" English as a starting point
On first contact with English, learners are confronted with unfamiliar categories of sounds, stress and intonation patterns, as well as unfamiliar syntactic and lexical forms.
There is quite enough here to come between the listener and the meaning of what is being said, even when utterances are delivered in a relatively clear "slow colloquial" style.
Exactly which pronunciation style the teacher should use depends partly on the context in which English is being learnt. Many teachers have traditionally derived advantages from adopting "educated Southern English"—an extended conception of RP—as their model.
It was for many years the accent most frequently encountered by foreign students on English-medium training courses. It has also been described more fully than most other varieties, making it a convenient starting point for pronunciation teaching.
Firstly, "slow colloquial" is a satisfactory model for production purposes for most learners at beginner to intermediate level.
Because it maintains relatively clear segments, syllables and words, the acoustic signal is comparatively strong and explicit. German business executives speaking to their Japanese counterparts on the telephone, for example, may need to make their speech particularly explicit.
Similarly, an Iranian air-traffic controller would be ill-advised to base his or her production on an informal style containing extensive simplification through processes such as elision and assimilation.
Before the mid-1970s, most general English coursebooks contained little or no pronunciation or sound-practice material, apart from texts that could be used for reading aloud if time permitted.
Even if "slow colloquial" is rarely heard in exactly this form in native-speaker conversation, I believe that opportunities for students to master its sound system and to understand how the speech organs are used to produce different sounds are worth including in course materials.
I have noticed that Spanish and Japanese learners can have particular difficulty with unfamiliar sound categories. Although their written accuracy may be sufficient to place them at intermediate level, their classmates may still have difficulty understanding them when they speak.
Host families who are accustomed to receiving students from many different countries may also be more sympathetic towards learners whose pronunciation contains clear, well-formed segments, even when these are not characteristic of ordinary native-speaker conversation.
Practise the production and recognition of the 44 English phonemes
Although I will argue later for greater emphasis in coursebooks on the identification and production of stress and intonation patterns, I am by no means opposed to systematic pronunciation and sound-practice material.
Recognition and production of the RP categories take learners through the processes of active listening and conscious control of their speech organs.
It may be argued that consonants are more important than vowels because they provide more clues to meaning. However, I would not overlook the part played by social acceptance and the listener's motivation in "wanting to understand".
Although the neutral vowel is used extensively in informal English, Arab speakers who use it in place of other vowel sounds may find that their speech does not hold the attention of their listeners for very long, even in the classroom.
Training in tongue and lip positions and in mouth openings should encompass both consonants and vowels. The sound system as a whole is involved in extended speech, and there is value in teaching the rationale behind sounds that are easy as well as those that are difficult.
Problems peculiar to particular monolingual groups can also be anticipated, identified and addressed through additional practice. This is usually the responsibility of the teacher rather than the general coursebook.
Once the initial difficulty of a new sound system, together with new syntactic and lexical forms, has been overcome, learners need to become increasingly aware that "slow colloquial" is not a satisfactory model for comprehension.
Most learners are grateful for the simple model provided by the teacher when studying in Britain. It resembles the model they have often encountered in other non-native situations, and it is reassuring to have at least one person who understands you!
My learners in Brighton quickly discover that people outside the classroom generally speak in a different way. However, they do not accuse me of treachery for simplifying my speech in the early stages.
They would have good reason for complaint if I never allowed them to listen to the kind of English that represents the reality of the acoustic signal produced in informal communication between native speakers.
Include a variety of speaking styles in practice materials
Once students have received systematic coverage of the sound system, the teaching programme can move towards other useful tools for extracting meaning from natural speech. Listening practice should include informal English and a variety of speakers in natural situations.
This should include conversations between people who are largely unaware that they are being listened to by a non-native audience.
Teachers are notably poor at reproducing informal speech naturally: as soon as they see a blank expression, they tend to increase the acoustic signal. Recorded material is therefore normally needed to expose learners to authentic variations in spoken English.
Practise the recognition of stress and intonation patterns
The learner's ability to identify the placement of stress, tone and sense groups, particularly the tonic syllable, is vitally important when attempting to extract meaning from informal speech.
It would be easy to list a whole range of auditory and visual signals that help identify stress, but I would not complicate the teaching programme with all of them at this stage.
Basic listening tasks followed by fairly conventional comprehension tests—True or False, Multiple Choice and Question and Answer—can provide useful exposure and practice.
The selection of varied and interesting texts appropriate to the level of the class should have first priority. This can be followed by straightforward practice in identifying and using stress placement, relying mainly on the acoustic signal.
If additional preparation is needed, "slow colloquial" can again be used as a "jumping-off point", with students observing how different stress placements can alter the meaning of an utterance. Byrne and Walsh's Listening Comprehension is a useful resource for this purpose.
The student is required to choose between four possible interpretations of an utterance. The teacher limits the possibilities to one by following specified stress and intonation patterns when reading the utterance.
Teaching stress placement also provides a useful context for the study of intonation patterns. At this stage, it would be profitable to introduce the basic tunes and some of the functions associated with them.
Associate basic tunes with the functions and attitudes they commonly indicate
The low fall may indicate a statement; the low rise, checking; the high fall, approval or exclamation; the high rise, surprise; and the fall-rise, contemplation.
A little reference to syntax—Yes/No questions, Wh-questions and "Or" questions—may also help with the decoding and encoding of meaning.
Since stress provides important clues to syntax and tune, as well as focusing attention on the message, the third spiral in my teaching programme brings together the most useful signals of stress placement.
So far these signals have mainly been acoustic, although we have already noted that "informal English" can have a highly reduced acoustic signal.
Use video to practise recognising paralinguistic features
The advent of video has made it much easier for course planners to demonstrate the variety of signals people use to emphasise the meaningful parts of their utterances. These include both oral and visual features.
Useful signals present in both "slow colloquial" and "informal" speech include paralinguistic features such as loudness, speed of delivery and variation in voice quality; gestural features such as nodding, frowning, twitching, narrowed eyes and raised or puckered brows; and facial features such as movements of the lips and jaw and different degrees of lip rounding.
The movements of the lips and jaw can help the listener identify segments of words, while more pronounced muscular movements will often help to indicate stress placement.
A large muscular movement usually occurs on the tonic syllable—the syllable in the tone group on which there is a pitch movement and which therefore carries the main information focus.
Pauses can usually be relied upon to mark the edges of tone and sense groups, each of which contains this important syllable: the tonic. Recognition of the tonic and other stressed syllables provides useful clues to syntactic structure.
In identifying the rhythm formed by particular combinations of strong and weak stresses, students may become better able to predict which items are nouns or verbs and whether nouns are preceded directly by articles or adjectives.
Knowledge of syntax and vocabulary helps listening comprehension
Awareness of syntactic structure is useful in listening comprehension insofar as it helps learners to extract meaning, but the relationship works in both directions.
Knowing the meaning of at least some of the words in an utterance can help students identify its syntactic structure and can also enable them to guess the meaning of unfamiliar items, either directly or indirectly.
Many students fail to comprehend or produce English speech because their vocabulary is insufficient. A basic course in discourse analysis may also contribute to the solution, for example by teaching common logical and cohesive devices.
Build vocabulary specifically to support listening comprehension
The fourth element of my approach involves vocabulary building, with particular attention to linguistic markers and other cohesive devices.
In conversation, speaker A may complete a sentence and speaker B may begin answering it immediately. Indeed, speaker B may even begin to answer before speaker A has uttered every word in the prompt.
Speaker B must therefore have predicted the likely end of A's sentence and begun to structure his or her reply before starting to speak.
The ability to predict the type of contribution that is about to be made is particularly useful for students who need to listen to lectures in academic institutions.
Words and phrases such as on the other hand, nevertheless, similarly, likewise, conversely, therefore, as a result and moreover help listeners to predict the type of contribution about to be made to a logically presented argument.
Reference skills: recognising lexis that marks structure
Practice in recognising anaphoric and cataphoric markers can train students to consider an utterance in relation to what has gone before and what may follow.
Considering the total length of an utterance in relation to previous utterances can also reveal aspects of syntactic structuring.
At higher levels of language learning, students are ready to cope with the more complex terminology, syntax and semantic structures encountered in the specialist fields in which English is used.
Vocabulary | Notions | Concepts | Cultural awareness | Familiarity with the topic
Practice in the syntax of "informal English" can continue, since verbal fillers and apparently disconnected phrases are common both in English for business and technology and in general English.
The ability to understand spoken English depends on much more than auditory and visual signals.
Familiarity with the topic and its associated terminology, the complexity of the syntax and semantic structure, and the style of presentation adopted by the speaker are all important factors.
Listening skills can therefore be developed by providing helpful background information about the topic before the text is presented.
A gradation beginning with texts involving a high degree of familiarity and progressing towards more complex subject matter and terminology is usually advisable.
Anticipation questions relating to the themes or argument, or a preliminary statement of the main hypothesis, can focus interest and attention on important conclusions and relationships within the text.
Fine-tuning: practise recognising assimilated and elided forms
The fifth part of my teaching programme focuses more closely on the problems of listening to "informal English". It still involves reception rather than production.
Although I would insist on the production of the weak, short and contracted forms also present in RP, I would not teach learners to produce assimilated and elided forms as a general requirement.
I agree with Dr Gillian Brown that sophisticated students who have been taught to recognise these forms will introduce them naturally into their own speech when they feel able to control them.
When confronted with the reduced acoustic signal of "informal English", it is useful for learners to understand how movements at the edges of vowels can provide clues to the consonants in the vicinity. Much of this decoding takes place unconsciously.
Summary
In conclusion, here is a summary of my teaching programme:
- Teach the comprehension and production of a form of "slow colloquial" English suitable for the communicative needs of the learner.
- Move beyond practice in the comprehension of RP by including a variety of styles of "informal English" as listening material. The emphasis at this stage is on practice. Comprehension should be tested in a variety of ways, including "Task Listening".
- Teach the auditory and visual signals that reliably indicate stress placement. Practice material requiring students to recognise and mark strong stress, together with the use of video, can be helpful here.
- Teach the most common tunes. Practice should also focus on the relationships between stress, tune, syntax and meaning.
- Develop vocabulary, giving particular priority to lexis containing important signals, concepts, references, cohesive devices and other discourse markers. The focus here is comprehension of spoken English at paragraph level.
- Ensure that practice material reflects the fact that students may be exposed simultaneously to "informal English" and specialised technical areas of language use.
- Teach the sound system in greater detail, including the relationships between vowel length and quality and consonant sounds, points of articulation, and their modification in "informal English".
Books to teach listening skills
Teaching Listening Comprehension – Penny Ur [09/02/1984]. Especially useful for producing your own materials.
Listening to Spoken English – Gillian Brown [09/07/1990].
Teaching the Spoken Language – Gillian Brown and George Yule [01/02/1984]. Excellent for essays on the distinctive features of spoken English.