The
two-sides rule in teaching
listening and pronunciation
by Richard Cauldwell
-1
1.
Pronunciation: the misrepresentation of speech
I
have long believed in the rule that listening and pronunciation
work are two sides of the same coin the coin being
the spoken language. This is the two-sides rule
which has an important implication. Every time you do a pronunciation
activity, you are teaching students something about the spoken
language. Therefore, like it or not, you are teaching students
something of how to listen. So if pronunciation activities
consist primarily of the accurate articulation of the segments
of isolated words, then students are learning like
it or not facts about the spoken language.
These facts are, of course, not facts at all
they are misrepresentations. Unfortunately, such misrepresentations
are common: vocabulary lists, and dictionaries give information
about the pronunciation of the citation forms of words, and
promote a view of the spoken language as a sequence of citation
forms words bounded by pauses, stressed, with falling
tones. Clearly, this is a misrepresentation of the spoken
language as experienced by the listener. It is also (because
of the two-sides rule) a misrepresentation of speech-production
in pursuit of segmental accuracy (a worthy aim in itself),
students practise disfluent speech.
The
listeners experience of normal speech (however one might
choose to characterise normal) is of a stream,
words flow into each other in patterns (tone-units, tone-groups,
breath-groups, pause-groups) in which some words retain ressemblance
to the citation form and others are pulled out of shape.
2.
Yings dilemma and the sound-shape of words.
Pronunciation
work therefore, insofar as it focuses on citation forms promotes
a view of speech which is an obstacle to effective listening.
Students learn ideal sound-shapes for words (citation forms),
but do not learn the wide range of sound-shapes that a word
can have when streamed in normal speech. Even
within the speech of one speaker, words take on different
sound-shapes according to their position in the variety of
patterns known as tone-units. These sound-shapes vary according
to speed, volume, whether the words are prominent or not,
whether or not they are the location for tones. We dont
teach this variability in our work on speech. We should
because students are asking for it, as the words of Yings
diary indicate:
I
believe I need to learn what the word sounds like when it
is used in the sentence. Because sometimes when a familiar
word is used in a sentence, I couldn't catch it. Maybe it
changes somewhere when it is used in a sentence (Goh
1997, p. 366)
For
Ying, words that are known become unkown
in streamed speech. This is Yings dilemma.
Our typical response to Yings dilemma has been to throw
our hands in the air and say that the only way around this
problem is immersion or osmosis: immersion by living in countries
where the language is spoken (Rost, 1990) or tested osmosis,
unmediated by pedagogic intervention, in the form of extensive
listening.
We
throw our hands in the air because we believe that the variability
is so great, so unpatterned, that it is impossible generalise,
and therefore impossible to teach. I disagree. There are patterns
in the stream of speech: and we can use these patterns as
a mode of presentation of speech for both listening and pronunciation
materials. If we do, then it is possible to teach pronunciation
in such a way that it represents normal speech more accurately,
and practises accuracy and fluency simultaneously. In doing
so it thereby promotes a picture of speech which aids, rather
than obstructs, the acquisition of listening skills.
3.
Streaming Speech
Streaming
Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners
of English is an electronic publication
which aims to solve the problem of the misrepresentation of
speech. It does this by using normal spontaneous speech as
the model to be imitated and emulated; and it rejects the
immersion and extensive listening
solutions to the problems of teaching listening, by paying
close attention to the fastest stretches of speech, where
Yings dilemma is likely to be at its most acute. It
makes use of the patterns of speech identified in the work
of David Brazil (Brazil, 1994, 1997) he calls them
tone units, I call them speech units to present samples
of spontaneous speech for both the teaching of listening and
pronunciation. A key feature of the publication is the use
of web-based multi-media technology, which allows students
to click on a line of transcript, and to hear it as it was
originally spoken.
3.1
The speakers
Streaming
Speech is a ten-chapter electronic publication which features
recordings of eight speakers of English from the United Kingdom
(seven speakers) and Ireland (one). All the recordings are
of unscripted, spontaneous speech, and contain many features
that would be edited out of the written language: pauses to
give planning time, re-starts, self-corrections, repetitions.
Such features provide a discourse syllabus for both listening
and pronunciation which I shall return to in 3.3 below.
All
of the speakers are associated in some way with the University
of Birmingham in the UK: they are either lecturers (full-time
or part-time), or senior figures in the administration. Their
recordings are largely (but not wholly) monologic and
this makes them suitable for the identification of samples
for modelling pronunciation. All but one of them consist of
biographical talk: the exception is of one person giving a
lecture on early English grammar. There is one accent from
Dublin in the Republic of Ireland (Chapter 8) but the other
accents are close to Standard Educated British English
again this makes the recordings suitable for use for modelling
pronunciation. There are however some slight differences,
with two speakers having certain characteristics of a London
accent, and two others have characteristics of the British
West Midlands.
3.2
Two layers and a filling
The
first eight chapters have a common structure, which has its
origin in the two-sides rule but is best thought of
as a structure akin to a cake with two layers, with a filling
in between the two layers. The top layer consists of two sections
devoted to listening, the bottom layer consists of two layers
devoted to pronunciation. But first, a description of the
filling.
3.3
The filling Discourse Features
The
Discourse Features section is devoted to describing
the patterns of normal speech. Over the eight chapters, students
are introduced to a way of viewing speech, based on the work
of David Brazil, which provides a window on speech.
This window is a means of observing and capturing the variability
of the stream of speech, and of taming the variability so
that it can be learned from it is a syllabus for listening
and pronunciation derived from an analysis of normal speech.
It
provides a carefully staged introduction to the patterns of
speech, and the effects these patterns have on the sound-shapes
of the words they contain. In other words, this section provides
the tools which can lead to solving Yings dilemma. It
does so by paying very careful attention to the relationship
between the fast and the slow forms of words (see Figure 1)
and by providing a step by step introduction to the
variability of normal speech: varying speed, varying rhythms,
level and falling tones, rising tones, speech-units, stress-shift,
and high and low pitch.
Figure
1 Close attention to fast and slow forms of words

3.4
The Listening layer
The
Discourse Features section is preceded by the
listening layer, which consists of two sections: Listening
comprehension, and Focus. The Listening comprehension
section provides information about the context and topic matter
of the recording, and sets questions for the students to answer
on screen as they listen. These questions are normally targetted
at the fastest meaning-bearing stretches of speech in the
recording, or those stretches which contain patterning (rhythmic,
intonational, interactional) which are useful focuses for
understanding the spoken language. Having answered the questions,
students are invited to recall and write down those parts
of the recording that provided evidence for the answers they
have chosen. They then move to the Focus section, where they
can see a transcript of that part of the recording that contains
evidence for the answers. They can click on any line of the
transcripts, and hear them as they were originally spoken
(See Figure 2).
Figure
2 Transcripts in the Focus section

Note:
each line represents a speech unit; the numbers down the left
hand side are reference numbers to the complete transcript;
the numbers down the right hand side represent the speed of
speech units in words per minute.
These
transcripts (two or three depending on the number of comprehension
questions set) are set out in speech-units which
closely ressemble the tone-units identified by David Brazil.
It is the patterning of these speech units, rather than of
sentences (Ying, mistakenly, talked of somewhere in
the sentence) that most affects the sound-shapes of
words.
The
questions, and therefore the transcripts, have been targetted
at those parts of the recording that are scrutinised in section
3, the Discourse Features section.
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