**This blog stopped its activity in February 2020. It stays on as a frozen blog in time that holds ideas, reflections, and growth of an ever-evolving version of myself as a person and academic**
PronunciAtion bites or PronunciAtion BITES? Reflections, anecdotes, ideas and resources for the teaching of pronunciation and phonetics, and some other nerdy assorted bits for pronthusiasts.
This is yet another podcast-y post, unedited, off the top of my head, based on the lessons we can learn when things go wrong.
Some references you may want to consult:
Field, J. (2014). Myth 3:Pronunciation teaching has to establish in the minds of language learners a set of distinct consonant and vowel sounds. In Grant, L. (2014). Pronunciation Myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. Michigan Press. (I reviewed his chapter here)
Fraser, H (2010). Cognitive theory as a tool for teaching pronunciation. In: De Knop, S, F. Boers, A. De Rycker (2010) Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter
BTW, here's J.K. Rowling's speech on the "fringe benefits of failure":
This is another post in-passing on some of my observations regarding listening comprehension. This time, related to real life and on location! (Dublin, at the moment!)
I mentioned in my previous post that our expectations and knowledge may have a positive or negative effect on comprehension. When it comes to travelling, the knowledge of what to expect in certain situations, particularly service encounters, is essential to avoid communication breakdowns. We all know the pragmatic "scripts" for the institutional dialogues in our culture, the ropes are part of what Widdowson calls our "schematic knowledge". However, when placed in a foreign country, no matter how much you may know about the language, if you don't know what to expect, certain questions may catch you off guard.
Situation 1: Supermarket. Typical questions that I did not see coming and required extra effort:
-Would you like the receipt? (The transaction was over, and in my country they give me the receipt straightaway, which is why the question surprised me)
-Have you got a Nectar card? (Difficult to get at first,r but I thank the countless hours of English radio ads that clarified this for me. It is a kind of loyalty card for a certain supermarket.)
Situation 2: First time at Starbucks abroad. In my country, you always get the plastic cups, it's a given (and not at all ecological). But in Lotndon, after ordering my drink and taking great care to mention the size and type of drink, and feeling quite pleased with myself, I got the folliwing question: "To eat in?". If it had been, as I got in other places "To eat in or take away?", I would have surely understood at once. But this sole question in such a rush, just lost me.
Here ends my non-scientific post on list comp, in the hope that we realise that it's not all about language, that cultural conventions should be part of our language teaching practices (especially if we aim at communication), and that pragmatics has a major role in listening comp as well.
(Sorry about the typos and other atrocities, I'm writing this on my mobile)
Sorry I have not been updating the blog lately. Good news is that I have finally submitted my MA thesis, so I guess I will be getting up to speed with all my drafted posts and ideas soon!
***
This year I have read and heard a lot about the influence of phonology in listening and comprehension. It is clear that the ability to sustain one's attention through time is also a key element in making sense of speech.
In the book by Cauldwell that I have reviewed, there is a description of the complex phenomena that occurs in spontaneous speech, with all the blurred areas and the "squeeze zones", whose knowledge or awareness of can inform our listening comprehension practices.
Some interesting experiences I have had in the last few months have led me to (informally) hypothesize that phonological knowledge can at times affect comprehesion, particularly in my case, when this knowledge has hindered the possiblity of paying attention to the actual meaning of the message!
(BTW, this is a mere retelling of a personal experience and not an attempt at a research paper, but if any of you out there wants to take this up ..... go ahead!)
I posted a tweet in this respect a few weeks ago, and it got retweeted as:
Occupational hazard MT @pronbites:..sitting for an oral exam. Couldn’t start talking straightaway—I was analysing the examiner’s intonation!
— Erik Singer (@accentvoiceguy) noviembre 20, 2014
So I guess that my basic knowledge of intonation can be an "occupational hazard" at times. And in this post, I would like to briefly, informally, share with you why.
This year, more than ever, I have been involved in exams, interviews, lunch/dinner talks, and meetings with native speakers of English. And one of the things I have almost unconsciously found myself doing, is trying to decode the speakers' intonation, in each and every of these interactions. As I listened to my interlocutors, I was matching contours in my mind, and linking them to the phonological theories and abstract meanings, and communicative values I recalled from the bibliography.
In general, it all went pretty smoothly, and I think (or hope, rather) my interlocutors did not get to notice, until.....until something went wrong. The moment I could not place a certain contour in the "boxes" of my mind, the moment the intonational contour did not seem to match the pragmatic meaning I thought that utterance was projecting, then both the words and the contour would disappear from my short term memory, and I would miss my cue. These mismatches completely led me astray.
Of course, it could easily be claimed that I was forcing my attention to be split into decoding the actual meaning and decoding the form. After all, I do this all the time when I watch films or series, and I even echo certain utterances when they are interesting, intonation-wise (and I've taken to doing this for Spanish as well!). But I guess that there is something in the face-to-face, synchronous, live nature of communication which appeared to add some extra difficulty to my ability to sustain attention and decode at the same time.
These experiences led me to think about my Phonetics II dictations. I have to admit I am not a big fan of dictations, myself, though I somehow acknowledge their contribution to the course and to the learning process. (I do have alternative ideas to test these skills, however. Who knows, I may introduce some big changes to my 2015 courses.....). What I notice in my students' dictation papers is that their focus is so greatly placed on the form, that they sometimes fail to decode certain items or whole utterances because they are not making sense of the meaning. I do, in general, provide a short context, but as students have so many "on-the-task" concerns, as they are, in fact, being assessed through dictations, there is no room for meaning. In this respect, I attended some thought-provoking talks at the conference in UNSAM by professors at Universidad de La Plata and also Universidad del Comahue, who presented some very interesting activities to contextualise dictations and make them "meaningful". There is also a research paper on dictations and pragmatic expectancy grammar by my friend and colleague Francisco Zabala that also discusses these issues. So I guess that one thing is what we expect to hear, another is what we hear, and yet another thing is what happens when these two factors interact in an activity that is to be assessed and marked.
So in my introspection as to what "blocked" my ability to start producing answers straightaway whenever my interlocutors nominated me to produce the next turn, I found another element - an affective element. I guess I also feel I am being assessed. Probably not by my interlocutor, who is genuinely communicating with me, but by my own personal expectations and misconceptions, and even, obsession, regarding the intonation I feel I should hear, and the one I should produce "in return". I am assessing my own knowledge of the intonation systems of English. I am probably, even trying to still find evidence that some of the theories I have read do work. I am even, I guess, trying to find answers for the things I can't explain, theoretically-wise.
Looking back, affective issues and self-esteem are important in my ability to comprehend spoken language. I had this experience in the streets of York (my favourite place in the world, by the way) last March. As I was walking, a lady who was selling Avon products approached me. She asked me a question with a rising tone that completely lost me. I could not get a word she said and I started feeling hot and red in the face. I replied with a high rise "Sorry?", and she repeated the question. I felt so ashamed about having lost it again, that I risked a "No, I'm afraid" as an answer, and I got a "Oh, that's why!", which made me feel so puzzled and embarrased that I just uttered "I am sorry, I have to go" and stormed off. I kept thinking, as I walked away, that if I had said "Sorry, I don't understand" with a Spanglish accent, I would have received a more intelligible answer by this woman. And I think that this is what made me so angry at myself. (Shrink alert!)
All in all, this post has been an attempt to present some feelings regarding intonation and comprehension in a personal diary style. I guess that some of you out there have experienced similar situations and emotions regarding listening comprehension. If you are studying phonetics and writing dictations, you may even find some of these frustrations familiar. I'll try to "relax my grip", or as someone has suggested, "suspend my knowledge" on my next interactions with English speakers to see if things change. I'll keep you posted!
P.S. I am sorry if any of my readers happened to be one of the people in the occasions I described. You are then duly warned that you may encounter an intonation-freak in our next meetings....
Today I made a very humble presentation at one of the Colleges I work at, and the one I graduated at as well, for the annual "Jornadas", organised by a special commission in the English Department called EDAPI.
Bad hair day, as usual :p
I have decided to call the presentation "Phonetics-To-Go", as I have mostly done a review of some free or "low-cost" mobile apps I have found that allow you to take pronunciation with you, everywhere!
A few disclaimers:
I have only reviewed free apps, free trials and some 1-dollar apps. I know there are brilliant paid apps out there, but they exceed the scope of my presentation...( and my pocket at the moment!.)
The inclusion of these apps in my PowerPoint slides does not entail any endorsement. During the presentation I listed some of the pros and cons of each app and made a point of whether they include ads or require further payment, for instance.
I have focused on a few apps and a few skills. I know there are more advanced apps out there that allow you to work with spectograms and waveforms, to mention but a few, but I have addressed the profile of my audience and I have mostly focused on ELT.
I don't get any benefits out of reviewing these apps. Feel free to try them, and test them, install them or uninstall them, but do so at your discretion.
Not all apps will work on all devices, in spite of the operating system. For example, the apps for Blackberry only run in BB10 devices.
Before downloading an app, always read its description, check the company/individual behind the design, and particularly focus on the "permissions" you need to grant for the app to work on your device.
What to do with these apps and how to apply them in your lessons is a choice you will need to make for your own groups, levels and culture. I will, in the future, devote a post to possible uses for these apps.
Having made all the preliminary remarks I thought fit (faithful to my usual quest for "down-to-earthness"), here's the PowerPoint for you:
I attended a truly enriching event two weeks ago: a conference on the teaching of Phonetics, called " III Jornadas de la Didáctica de la Fonética", at Universidad de San Martín and the "Post-Jornadas" at "ENSLV Juan Ramón Fernández".
This post will be an attempt at reporting some of the highlights of the conference, at least according to my own personal interests. The pictures of the slides are a bit blurry but you can enlarge them by clicking on them, at least.
The conference started with a recorded interview to Alan Cruttenden by Mgtr Roxana Basso, which tackled points such as the use of the label "General British" and the motivations behind that choice (which I'd seen Jack Windsor Lewis explore years ago here) and the current associations in the media with RP. Mgtr Basso also discussed the future of the so-called Estuary English, to which Cruttenden, as many such as Prof Wells have done, agrees it will not become a future standard or "replacement for RP" as some people have claimed. Some interesting bits that were mentioned that make instruction and priorities for pronunciation teaching different from the ones ELF may propose were related to the role of word stress and hesitation pauses, which help learners become "native sounding", if that is the aim. There were quite a number of interesting views in these 20 minutes, and I could not take them all down, but the videoconference by Basso-Cruttenden will be made available online soon, so I'll link to it HERE once it is online.
The opening panel was brilliant, and I particularly enjoyed the presentations by:
Alejandro Renato, who is working on an "intonation map" of Argentinian accents of Spanish using Sp-ToBI, from a connectionist perspective of perception. Renato mentioned the complexities behind the study and systematisation of intonational features, including the effect of sonority and duration, for example, in the measurement and meanings of contours, the need for a consideration of a "microtonal" dimension, and the multiplicity of dimensions operating and the amount of different layers of info encoded in a single contour. Brilliant remarks included the fact that human processing time is not lineal, as we work on different "temporal windows". There was also a critical review of ToBI.
Leopoldo Labastía, made a fantastic presentation on the ways we mark foreground and background information in Spanish and English through tone and focus (in my humble opinion, the best talk at the conference):
María Emilia Pandolfi, an expert in the Phonology of Italian, discussed different activities to make pronunciation work more significant, communicative and contextualised.
On Friday afternoon, I made the most of the talks by:
Francisco Zabala, friend and brilliant colleague, who discussed ways of teaching Phonetics I from a top-down perspective. He has found that making students aware of stress, the contrast between content and function words, and the overwhelming presence of schwa, together with a few rules of thumb regarding spellings, can ensure student success in transcription and pronunciation.
Marisol Hernández, teacher and actress who discussed some ideas to relate our pronunciation work to drama, and made a point of how talking another language is a way of "staging something through our bodies"
Gonzalo Espinosa, Alejandra Dabrowski, Leopoldo Labastía from Universidad Nacional del Comahue reviewed the functions and intonation of cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences in English and Spanish and showed some great integrative materials for the Language and Phonetics lessons. I was truly inspired by the way they have managed to design instructional materials which place prosody in context and lead students towards using intonation naturally.
Adriana Cáldiz et al from Universidad Nacional de La Plata who reviewed different theories relating politeness to prosodic choices.
And later, I also made my own presentation on
ways of teaching the prosodic configuration of instructional discourse, based on my 2013 research and on the type of work I have been doing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse Intonation in the last two years, with my Lab 3 and 4 and Phonetics 2 courses.
Saturday morning was also interesting, with inspiring talks by
Andrea Perticone, another colleague who has a great brain for Phonetics, particularly everything acoustic. She presented her preliminary findings on the way we hear tones, and particularly on what happens when there are "non-prototypical" tones, in our context, those tones that go beyond the "mould" presented by O'Connor and Arnold, which dominates our teaching of tones from an imitative perspective. There were thought-provoking remarks on micro-prosodic effects that need to be considered for pitch measurement (pitch scaling, intensity, duration, the temporal dimension) which ToBI may not consider; issues of stylisation and compression, and allotony. Looking forward to hearing more on this, it was great!
Lucía Rivas and Miriam Germani from Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, who are also working on the prosodic configurations of genre from a SFL perspective (they are like my intellectual soul-mates!). They discussed their experience teaching intonation and discourse, and the need to get away from mere taxonomies to engage in discourse analysis proper, not only discussing linguistic but also paralinguistic features of text ypes.
Diana Martinez Salatín, who reported on an experiment relating pronunciation to transcription errors from interlanguage phonology theories.
There were also talks by colleagues from UNLP and UNCo stressing the importance of doing contextualised, significant dictation and pronunciation practice with authentic materials.
I missed the talks by Miriam Germani on Storytelling, and Ana Irazábal (Phonology FB page editor!) called "Funology", which I would have loved to attend, but concurrent sessions are like that.
***
On September 4th, the "Post Jornadas" took place at Lenguas Vivas Juan Ramón Fernández. My colleague Francisco Zabala made a presentation on the connections between phonetics and listening in our context of speakers of Riverplate Spanish learning English, and he reviewed some of the issues that affect comprehension and intelligibility. There were also some live comprehension experiments which proved how complex the whole process can be.
Almost a century of English pronunciation teaching in my country!
The next speaker was Patrick, a language assistant from the US, who commented on Upspeak, and some findings from the original paper on "Jeopardy" by Linneman. The presenter also made connections with political discourse and presented his own hypotheses on the matter.
Finally, another presentation by Andrea Perticone. This time, she discussed some connections between the Gestalt (notions of figure and ground) and issues of focus and tone in English, with clear examples and illustrative videos, very useful for learners. (And my intelligent phone run out of its unintelligent battery, which is why I don't have any pics, I am afraid :( )
***
Whenever I attend a conference, I generally feel excited about the networking, even more thrilled to learn new things, but I also cannot help feeling a bit miserable when I find that most of the research I do is self-imposed, non-funded, and that attending conferences generally means asking for the day off and getting that money discounted from my salary because the red tape in the City of Buenos Aires for us in tertiary education is just so impossible.
Anyway, I believe this conference was brilliant, as I have found like-minded people doing work on prosody more even than before, and to see we all come from different places and traditions and still see eye to eye, and that we all "dared" trod the path of intonation and meaning, which many people fear so fiercely, was just inspiring, and I am really grateful for the experience.
So here's the bunch of us, like-minded Phonlings from ISP JVG, ENSLV JRF, UNCo and UNLPam phonetising over food! Obviously!
***
It is always the case with concurrent sessions that you miss out on a lot of presentations you would ehave liked to see, so I am not reporting on all the papers, obviously. If you are curious, the whole programme and presentation titles are available HERE. And I have made a summary of my live tweeting below:
At one of the Teacher Training Colleges where I work, most second year trainees in their Laboratory Practice II course (the oral practice component of the Phonetics II subject) are exposed to one of the most widely-used materials in the world of intonation: Intonation of Colloquial English, by O'Connor and Arnold. In my humble and inexperienced opinion, this classroom material works fine to allow students to become aware of pitch changes and basic English tunes but not to help trainees see how tones create or help us negotiate meaning in interaction. Mind you, none of the teachers in the staff, as far as I know, considers the "attitudinal" aspect in depth to teach the tunes, as the theoretical framework in the Phonetics courses centers around the phonological contributions of Discourse Intonation and Systemic Functional Linguistics (You can read a great article on these ways of approaching intonation by my colleagues Lucía Rivas and Miriam Germani here) In spite of this, I have to admit I have not yet found a set of materials that so exhaustively provides models for different patterns except, perhaps, for the practice sections in the book by Wells (2006).
My experience many years after learning intonation via these materials is that the O'Connor and Arnold "experience" has conditioned by ability to hear and make sense of tunes. I have found it so hard to start "re-adapting" my perception of what is really going on in English, and the materials by Jack Windsor Lewis, and Roger Kingdon, however outdated they may seem to some people, have really helped me "break the mould" when it comes to perception of tones. However, I am a phonetics "freak" myself and I do care about phonetic and allotonic detail, but it is true that the native speaker processes the signal and assigns some meaning to it, he/she has some sort of "action-activity recognition" from a Conversation-Analysis perspective, and that is what matters in terms of the perception of intonation, I guess. An probably, this is what the teachers-to-be I am training need, so a collection of materials for oral practice and theoretical analysis of tones like the ones my colleagues have made at College does seem appropriate, as long as we don't lose touch with the real use of language "out there".
***
Anyway. Digression again, as I was not planning to get into an informal assessment of intonation materials (this deserves a better post, and I will write about this some time in the future). Today, I wanted to address a set of difficulties some students presented with the modelling of tones.
During my tutorial periods, students were given a set of drills from O'Connor and Arnold so as to read the patterns presented in the sentences. In spite of the fact that students do have the audio files of the book at their disposal and are supposed to imitate the audio, and do so pretty systematically, many students find it difficult to apply the patterns to a new, unrecorded, drill. Away from the model, there is no mental image to link the tune to.
At times, the image of the tunes in the students' minds are associated to a drill they remember by heart, and this helps, but at times, they find the transfer to a new context difficult. In this respect, I have tried two tips:
a) For students who need a reference drill:
Inspired by the DAR-DOOBY-DIPETY classic task by Mark Hancock, which I have rediscovered thanks to his presentation at IATEFL (also by the reference to the activity Krystina Poesova has made in her great talk at Harrogate!), I have found one out of many possible ways of helping students get a reference for tones. I have asked these students to record a DAR-DOOBY-DIPETY (and a four-syllabled word) DIPETITY version of each of the tones, in a different key, on their mobile phones. This has helped some students to have a ready-to-grasp voice note, recorded in their own voices, to keep as reference for the production of the tone for a different number of syllables as tails. When faced with a sentence with tone marks to read out, students would compare their versions to the DAR language ones on their mobiles (which they can retrieve really quickly!)
Here's an example of what I have asked my students to record on their mobiles:
I believe that the use of non-words for intonation reference may work, as it keeps meaning associations away from the tunes. In many occasions, students see the content of the words and apply a tune which they feel suits the content, but it does not match the pattern written in the book. (This, of course, makes for a great opportunity to discuss the different contexts that different decisions on intonation may project, but the purpose of the activity in question is mostly to get students to imitate or produce certain patterns in a more systematic way). I should maybe see, in the future, if getting students to use the same reference words for the tunes may backfire and lead to further confusion ( a creation of non-sense words for each different tone may turn out better), but so far, in the limited number of students I have tried this humble tip on, it appears to have worked!
b) For students that may not be aware of what they are producing or have trouble imitating the "master":
In this case, I have encouraged the creation of a sort of "attitudinal image" in the students' minds. Although I have made a point of the fact that attitudes may not always help them make an appropriate choice of tone, I have asked some students to associate an attitude, feeling or reaction to the tune in question. Some of these ideas were also related to Spanish feelings or expressions. These attitudes may or may not match what the tone is "doing" in that particular context, but the focus of this activity is to build a mental image of what the tone sounds like. So, for example, these are some of the mental attitudes that did the trick with those students who were at first unable to reproduce a tune:
High fall: complete refusal of something, as for Spanish: No! Estás loco!. Also for complete surprise: Copaaado!. (Translations: No! You must be mad! and Wicked!) Low fall: not surprised, it was obvious it was going to happen, as in Spanish: buah. Also sequence-closing, as for an argument: Se acabó. (Translations: Yep, duh, and It's over) Low rise: in general, the idea of counting objects with kids works as a mental image here. In order to make students aware of the step-down to begin the rise, I sometimes ask them to remember the voice of the Addams Familiy's butler, a sort of creaky-voice beginning:
High rise: this I have found a bit more difficult to model, and I generally ask students to go for a more "falsetto", "Shakira-like" note on the last syllable of the intonation phrase, mostly asking them to worry less about the starting point of the rise, and focus more on the end-point (avoiding, of course, an unnecesary prominence in the last syllable of the tail):
Fall-rise: Though not exactly the same in Spanish, many students get to associate the idea of a non-committal, insincere Sí, or Puede ser to this tone, in a context like "do you like my dress? (it looks awful). From these mental images, we teachers start fine-tuning the productions of tones for each student individually till students find their own way of producing the tones on the page, or the tones expected in a particular task. They will, later, with the support of the theory in their Phonetics courses, make their own choices in the un-marked texts and spontaneous speech tasks carried out in their courses. (Of course, all these initial notions and searches for the mental images needed to produce tones are fine-tuned individually and gradually. It is by no means our intention to harm students' vocal folds in any way or to force unnatural patterns out of them. These tasks are useful for the initial stages when gaining awareness of vocal range and possible glides is necessary, and continuous feedback and follow-ups on the part of the teacher then ensure that learners find a voice and a range that suits them best.)
I have not discussed the step ups and step downs for the onsets in this post, and for this, like some of my colleagues have done, I use the pianoor the harmonica apps on my mobile, and encourage learners to do the same. There are other tips "out there" which surely do the trick, so feel free to share them in the "comments" box below!
I am currently "mosaic reading", what with teaching, writing my MA thesis and more. But one of the books which has accompanied me since last year and which I have been reading with great care is Richard Cauldwell's Phonology for Listening. I am not only enjoying the book lots, but I have to admit it has also shaken the foundations of some of those beliefs behind my ideas of listening and speech production as well.
Plus, the book was nominated for an ELTon in Innovation in Teacher Resources, and it is both in paperback and e-book format.
Lots of people ahead of me have written very good & complete reviews of the book, such as the one by Wayne Rimmer (Available here, at the Pronsig FB page). I myself won't be reviewing the book formally, but I will be drawing upon some snippets which I feel are of major interest to me at this stage of my teaching.
***
As a self-confessed David Brazil fan (yes, when they ask you "what past historical figure would you like to interview if you had the chance?" I would most certainly choose him! I have issues!), reading a book by someone who has studied with him just makes me more than curious. Particularly, because they can tell us something about the "kitchen" of the whole system, something about the "didactic pruning" that we all engage into when teaching a topic and that may have led Brazil to make some simplification in his explanation, among other things. And also because I have not seen much developed from Brazil's time to now, at times just mere repetition of what was written in his books. So having someone taking this to the "next level", with adoptions and rejections of different bits of Discourse Intonation ideas, is more than appealing to me.
But this book exceeds the domain of Discouse Intonation, as it explores a wide range of topics, including:
perception and production models of speech,
changes to the stream of speech as we talk,
how spontaneous speech "works" and how it is different from other forms of "careful speech"
what happens when we transcribe speech
accents, identity and emotion in speech
the teaching of listening.
As you can see, it's a sort of manual or handbook on a number of topics, descriptions, observations, and reflections that can inform our teaching practices.
***
The book centers around two issues, two "dilemmas":
"Ying's dilemma", related to the problem that we know words, but we can't catch them in spontaneous speech.
I confess myself to having had lots of "Ying moments" this year, particularly in the North of England. In spite of the fact that I'd studied the accents thoroughly, so I supposedly knew what to expect, I found myself in York, "recruited" by an Avon saleslady who was asking me questions I never got to understand. I had to say "sorry" in a Spanglish accent to make her realise I wasn't really getting it (I'd say "sorry" with a rise twice before to request repetition) and she let me go. And on a bus to Whitby, two young people sitting next to me were talking of complaining to the company of the service, and one of them addressed me saying something that sounded to me like "Got a penner?", and after apologising and looking puzzled, I got a clarification: "something to write with". He had said "Got a pen or something?".
"Anna's anger" at not being taught to really listen, at being asked to complete listening comprehension activities without having any teaching of the phenomena of the stream of speech.
I generally do some teaching of the aspects of connected speech when I do listening comp activities, but it is true that I do this particularly when students have trouble with some specific answers. I ask my students to write down what they think they hear, the orthography of what they think they heard, even if it doesn't look like a familiar word, and then we start analysing what went on in the stream of speech, the processes that were applied. But I have to admit that "Anna's anger" made me feel guilty about not doing this more often, particularly in my Lab lessons at College.
***
Some of the concepts I believe to be particularly interesting, especially because of the way they were presented, and which I have adopted immediately, are related to the "Window on Speech" framework adopted by the author, that uphholds a model that focuses on spontaneous speech with its "transient, invisible, plastic" features rather than on careful speech, the latter being the one we normally use for teaching production. I liked the notions of:
"acoustic blur", defined as "the way in which words in the stream of speech do not have clearly-defined beginnings or endings" (p.18),
"squeeze zones", those parts of speech that present non-prominent syllables and that present "squeezed" soundshapes, and that sound truly differently from the citation forms we all know too well, and which we, wrongly, expect to hear in spontaneous speech.
I found these ideas to be useful when doing dictation with my teacher trainees. I found that in the initial stages of recognition of onsets and nuclei, nuclei were not really a problem (at least, if the sentences were dictated with falls. Rises do bring about more trouble...). But the presence or lack of an onset were more difficult to spot for my learners. Drawing their attention to the "squeeze zones" in the pre-heads, and the comparison of the strong, better-defined vowels they would hear if the items were accented, has proven really effective.
These ideas by the author are futher developed in Part 2, and there is a great section on "Soundshapes" that deals with function words. Like in the rest of the book, there are a myriad audio clips exemplifying each and every point (the whole reading experience is a lesson in listening itself! Awesome!), and there is a description of these "weak forms" as we know them, together with other items which are not generally considered in other sources, except perhaps for Jack Windsor Lewis' blog (do an entry search for articles on less commonly reported reduced items!). The resources generally consulted for theory on weak forms in Phonetics/Phonology courses include the famous Gimson's... edited by Cruttenden (now in its 2014 edition!), the textbook by Peter Roach, and the "37 Weak Forms" article by Ortiz Lira. Cauldwell's description of reductions in spontaneous speech would certainly defy many of the reduced-word lists we are used to putting together, plus revealing that reduction is far more common than we would be ready to accept!
Among the many definitions in the book, I quite enjoyed the reference to tones in careful speech as "countours of a landscape with high peaks, steep slopes and deep valleys" and the "gently rolling hills and shallow slopes of the English countryside" of spontaneous speech. This is so clear when it comes to the perception of the fall-rise by my students (and myself!) so used to O'Connor & Arnold's really steep fall-rises or rise-fall-rises, that the "shallow" fall-rises in spontaneous speech are either reconstructed because of our "theoretical expectations" or missed altogether. Another "challenge" to some long-established theoretical points, is the reference to the stress-timing theory. Though questioned from the early 1980s on by people like Roach and Cauldwell himself (click on the names for the articles), as it appears not to be a true reality of English speech, it is still a useful construct to teach English rhythm (in my humble opinion), but it is rejected if English is taught for ELF purposes, as weakening is not part of the Lingua Franca Core defined by Jennifer Jenkins.
The "Phonology for Listening" book presents cases of isochrony, but mostly claims that spontaneous speech is very rarely isochronous.
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The second part of the book also describes the shape of spontaneous speech, particularly the drafting phenomena: filled and silent pauses, restarts, repetitions, reformulations, markers of imprecision, softeners, issues of speed and articulation rate.... It is essential to bear these issues in mind when it comes to teaching production, as well, in my opinion. There was a great talk on fluency by Alan Tonkyn in the IATEFL PronSIG PCE last April with a great discussion of what was perceived as fluent by native examiners of L2 speakers of English, and the presence of drafting phenomena was not necessarily a "threat", except for a number of specifications:
All in all, the first two parts of this manual address extremely interesting points, challenge assumptions, and fine-tune our ears. I was truly enthusiastic to read it the first time, and to review my notes for this post, after having attended two talks by Richard at IATEFL, which helped me make better sense of the book still. The key issue to start with is:
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This ends my humble (intertextual!) review of Parts 1 and 2. I am most certainly not doing justice to the book, but you can always read it and read the reviews that are now around. Hope this piece has been enticing enough to go and have a taste!
My second part of this review, some time next week. And thanks for reading me!
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Celeb spot! I have a pic with the author! (I have cheekily selfied him during the IATEFL PronSIG event!).
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