In a language where "What's your address?" can become a homophone of "Watch or a dress?", there's plenty of scope for misunderstanding, even for what you might call 'native listeners'. For learner listeners, the situation is many times more perilous. For them, listening can be like wandering in a surreal soundscape.
For the native listener, homophones, puns, misheard lyrics and the like are the occasional source of delight. For the learner listener, they belong to the surreal soundscapes they inhabit for much of the time. This talk will explore the intersection between pronunciation and listening, in order to identify what it is that makes listening so tricky and weird for the individuals in our classes.
Following last weeks post featuring a box set on the price/prize minimal pair, here's a box set on the bean/bin distinction. Again, one person is the speaker and says one of the phrases. His/her partner is the listener and says which they understood - A, B, C or D.
This image is a minimal pair, squared - what I call a box set. One person says one of the phrases. The other has to listen and say A, B, C or D. The minimal pairs in this instance involve /s/ and /z/ - these are a pair of related consonants, the first unvoiced and the second, voiced.
This pair of sentences could almost be phrasal homophones (oronyms), except for the differences in punctuation. They play with the fact that the sound bite 'call Dan' is identical to the sound bite 'called Anne'. There are also two meanings of 'called' (to phone or shout out to someone or to be named), which make the pair of sentences rather confusing!
There is something missing at the heart of the listening component in most ELT course materials. They fail to dig deep into the actual raw material of the skill – what Richard Cauldwell calls the ‘sound substance’.
When it comes to ‘doing’ listening, many students feel they are starting from scratch rather than building on what they have already mastered. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the notion of ‘verbal stickiness’, and consider how we could exploit this phenomenon by focusing on various language patterns and using different activities to help students become more efficient and fluent listeners.
Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities.
Unscripted language is usually very different to the spoken language students encounter when doing listening activities in a general English course. Consequently, when students come to listen to spontaneous chat or discussion they are faced with many difficulties. What might these be and what can we teachers do about it?
