Richard Cauldwell: Training teachers to deal with authentic recordings

February 24, 2019

Richard Cauldwell: Training teachers to deal with authentic recordings

IH ELT CONFERENCE, 2019

Richard Cauldwell: Training teachers to deal with authentic recordings

In the second of the Friday evening plenaries, Richard Cauldwell presented us with a new approach to the teaching of listening in ELT and introduced us to a whole new metalanguage to talk about the processes and problems involved in listening.

Teachers (as expert listeners) are often unaware of the challenge of listening to authentic texts that our students face. To illustrate this, Richard used his (increasingly well-known) botanic metaphor.

Greenhouse – words are separate and individual, in an imposed order.
Garden – words relate to each other in a pleasing fashion (they ‘politely shake hands’), obeying rules of connected speech.
Jungle – the reality of authentic speech: words are deformed and warped in combination with other words (‘crush zones’) resulting in unruly and unpredictable ‘sound shapes’.

In order to present language (and listening skills in particular) to our learners, teachers often take the words ‘into the garden’. Listenings done in class are scripted, performed by actors in studios, without any of the extraneous noise and distractions of the real world, and without the false starts, errors, repetitions, etc. that characterise authentic speech. What our students actually perceive is represented in the slide below:

In fact, even at very advanced levels of proficiency (see below) the message from learners is that this is difficult and they need help to improve.

Even expert TL users experience problems with listening @olyaelt ‏

In order to achieve this, we need to move away from the current orthodoxy on teaching listening skills: a mixture of beliefs about authentic speech (e.g. stress timing), pedagogical techniques and strategies (e.g. schema activation, prediction, monitoring). In ELT, we don’t pay enough attention to decoding the ‘sound substances’ that our learners will encounter in the real world.

There are a number of obstacles that our learners need to overcome in order to understand authentic speech.

The ‘Blur Gap’

This is the stream of speech that exits the mouth of the speaker, travels through the air and arrives at the ear of the listener. Expert speakers and listeners believe that what they are producing and hearing are fully formed words, but they actually produce a ‘mush’ of sounds. One common phenomenon is the omission of a syllable (‘sylldrop’), e.g the word ‘physical’ in rapid connected speech may actually be pronounced ‘fizzle’.

Meaning Focus

Listening practice in the language classroom generally puts emphasis on meaning. Typically, comprehension questions may focus on a detail, e.g. a time or a number. Learners may identify this, get the answer correct and we think they have ‘understood’ the listening, whereas in reality, they might have only understood a very small proportion. The often repeated ‘don’t worry if you don’t understand everything’ is not actually very helpful for our learners, so Richard argues that we should actually leave meaning to one side and focus more on form.

Sound substance v sight substance

‘Sight substance’ is the written form of a word or phrase, which is tidy and stays in place. Sight substance is visible, whereas sound substance is invisible and fleeting. See the following slide for a comparison of ‘sight’ and ‘sound’ substance.

Models of speech

As well as the written form of the language, teachers often present spoken forms in an unrealistic ‘careful speech model’ (CSM). This is the dominant speech model in ELT and illustrates the ‘correct’ way to say a word or sentence, which is great for teaching pronunciation. However, listening involves understanding the lack of clarity and messiness of real speech. In order to help our learners handle the relationship between sound substance and words, we need to move away from the CSM towards the Spontaneous Speech Model (SSM), which captures the unruliness, tames it and makes it teachable.

Key components of SSM

All words have multiple sound shapes and flexible forms. It’s important to highlight the features of word clusters and draw learners’ attention to the way sounds can be dropped, blurred or blended.

Words undergo streamlining processes when they are crushed together, for example the memorably named ‘consonant death’, the ‘hiss effect’ in ‘it’s wonderful’ → ‘’swonderful’, or the ‘sylldrop’ we have already encountered (see slides below).

As teachers, we need to be able to enter the in-between ‘mondegreen’ land where words can be produced with one intention and understood as something completely different (often heard in the lyrics to songs). As an illustration, Richard played us an extract from an interview with the songwriter Randy Newman here and challenged us to identify whether he was saying ‘can’ or ‘can’t’ (in the context it could have been either). Polarisk: the risk of hearing something intended as positive, as a negative, and vice versa.

Finally, Richard reminded us to ‘beware the logic of meaning’! For example, we shouldn’t assume that because people are talking about the past, they actually use past tense endings. The presentation concluded with the following message: