Author Insights

Pronunciation for listening

Jonathan Marks, author of The Book of Pronunciation, discusses the role
pronunciation plays in listening skills
Pronunciation for listening
We probably tend to think of pronunciation primarily as a component of speaking skills - even
though, interestingly, coursebook components and supplementary materials dedicated to
'speaking' often pay scant attention to pronunciation!
In fact, though, pronunciation also plays a key role in listening. When we listen to our native
language we perhaps aren't normally very aware of this, but it can be highlighted for us when
we're faced with the challenge of listening to someone who has a very unfamiliar accent, even if
that person is talking clearly and audibly about a topic we're familiar with, and not using any
unfamiliar words or idioms, and there's no distracting background noise. We may need to listen
with extra attention, and perhaps even interrupt from time to time to ask for repetition or
clarification, but gradually we tune in to the unfamiliar accent and begin to compensate
automatically for the differences between it and our own. Then we can relax our attention level.
Even then, though, we may find that we are distracted by the sound of the accent itself, and have
to remind ourselves to concentrate on the content of what the speaker is saying.

Listening to another language

What about listening to a language we are less familiar with? It's common to hear people say that
they attended a course in language X and thought they were coping with it quite well, then went
on their first trip to X-land and were dismayed to find that "I couldn't understand a thing! They all
spoke too fast!"
Why does this happen? Well, of course a large part of the difficulty may be that speakers of
language X are actually using language which the learner doesn't know. But, apart from that,
people often report not even being able to recognise even apparently simple words, phrases and
sentences which they have learned, and which they can understand easily when they read them or
when their teacher says them. It could be the case that the course they have attended has actually
contributed to this unfortunate state of affairs. It could be the case, for example, that:
1. the course doesn't include any listening work;
2. the teacher conducts the course mainly in the learners' L1, so that the learners don't get
any opportunity to hear the teacher speak the target language at length;
3. when the teacher speaks the target language, they speak unnaturally slowly and clearly,
because they want to help the class by making things as easy as possible;

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4. the teacher doesn't speak the target language idiomatically - either because their own
knowledge of the language is limited or out-of-date or derived mainly from books, or
because they want to protect the learners from what they consider to be 'sloppy' or 'slang';
5. the course makes use of recordings for listening work, but these are specially scripted for
language-teaching purposes, and recorded by actors who speak unnaturally slowly and
clearly and over-articulate every syllable; or
6. the course makes use of authentic, or at least simulated authentic, recordings for activities
such as listening for gist and listening for specific bits of information; the learners'
perception may well be that every time they do one of these activities they are surrounded
by the aural equivalent of fog and, although they can pick out isolated features of the
landscape under the guidance of the teacher and the tasks they've been set, the weeks and
months go by and the all-pervading fog never shows any sign of lifting.
The wish to help learners and make things easy by slowing down and speaking extra-clearly is
understandable and in a sense laudable - we should after all be doing what we can to help our
learners, shouldn't we? But in this case, we're actually doing them a disservice, by failing to
prepare them for their encounter with the language as it's spoken, spontaneously, by expert users.
All of this is true regardless of what the target language - language X - is, but it's particularly
serious in the case of English.

Why is short-cutting in speech so serious in the case of listening to English?

In any language, probably, native speakers and other expert, fluent speakers take short cuts in their
articulation of sequences of sounds, to some extent; they cut sounds short, slur them together,
miss them out and so on, so that words in the stream of speech don't necessarily have the fullyfeatured pronunciation that they do when they're spoken in isolation, in their citation form. In
English the effects of this short-cutting are particularly dramatic because:
1. Linking between consonants at the ends of words and vowels at the beginnings of words
obscures divisions between words, and can actually give a misleading impression of where
words start and finish - eg linked in tends to sound like link tin.
2. Similarly, linking between vowel sounds in adjacent words obscures word boundaries.
When taken out of context, for example, there may be no discernible difference between
you all, your wall and you wall. Of course, context and knowledge of grammar help a
listener to decide which interpretation is the right one - and here the third one is rather
unlikely in any imaginable context - but, below a certain level, learners who haven't been
primed with contextual information tend to rely on what they actually hear - or, rather,
what they think they hear - however implausible it might seem.
3. English is characterised by extreme differentiation between stressed and unstressed
syllables. The stressed ones stand out as identifiable, solid, reliable islands with an
identifiable contour in the surrounding, swirling, undifferentiated stream of speech; the
unstressed ones, on the other hand, tend to be pronounced fast, with low energy and with
reduced vowels, especially the 'schwa', so that they slip by anonymously before they can be
identified and grasped.

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4. Even reduced vowels in unstressed syllables still face a further threat: the threat of elision,
or complete annihilation: banana is often reduced to bnana, forever to frever, and so on.
5. As languages go, English has rather a lot of consonant clusters. But these are subject to a
great deal of elision - so that, for example, next week sounds like neck's weak, or five sixths
sounds like five six - and assimilation - so that, for example, Tyne Bridge sounds like time
bridge,
These processes of simplification in the stream of speech combine and conspire to disguise the
identity of words and word sequences. Here are just a couple more examples:
In the question "Is this the London Bridge train?", the main stress is on Bridge, and the word
London can sound like Lummm; this could be confusing to a learner-listener who is unfamiliar with
the local rail network and who might imagine a possible station called Lumm Bridge.
In the question "What time are you going to meet her?", the final two words are likely to sound
like meter / metre. Even in the context of a conversation about meeting a female person, it's quite
possible that a learner-listener might fail to interpret the last two words of the question
appropriately if they always expect her to be pronounced with /h/ and with a full, long vowel.

How to promote awareness of these issues with students

In Chapter Five of The Book of Pronunciation (Connected speech) there are a number of activities
designed to promote awareness of these 'short cuts' in pronunciation. For example:
Weak forms and grammar asks learners to identify and account for strong and weak forms of
function words such as that.
Fine doubt focuses on pairs of phrases that sound the same even though they consist of different
words - eg grey day / grade A - with prompts to enable learners to discover the similarities.
Nothing at all asks learners to identify similarities of pronunciation between words / phrases such
as tall and nothing at_all.
Goob morning [sic!] focuses on assimilation and elision in short phrases.
How many words? asks learners to listen to, and write, sentences which are spoken fast and which
exhibit various 'stream of speech' features.
The primary aim of these activities is to help learners to listen to English. There's essentially no
reason why they should incorporate 'connected speech' features into their own pronunciation. In
fact this can be counter-productive; pronouncing /h/ in meet her, rather than eliding it, is likely to
enhance intelligibility in English as a means of international communication. However, learners
might want to emulate native-like features of pronunciation if these make the job of pronouncing
English easier - eg they might find it easier to say time_bridge than Tyne_Bridge, teng_girls than
ten_girls, etc. Some might also feel intrinsically motivated to aspire to achieving a native-like
pronunciation.

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The 'pronunciation for listening' activities in The Book of Pronunciation are recorded on the
accompanying audio CD. Teachers using these activities can, of course, decide to use their own
voice instead of playing the recording. However, the recordings have at least two advantages:
1. They are scripted and acted, and not 'authentic', but they are reasonably representative of
spontaneous speech.
2. They remain the same with repeated playings, whereas if a teacher repeats items in an
activity, there's always the risk that they will alter and falsify the original pronunciation.

Finding out more

By using these activities you can help your students with their pronunciation and their listening
skills at the same time, as well as developing your own awareness of what spoken English sounds
like.
You can read about short cuts and other features of connected speech in Part A of The Book of
Pronunciation. And if you want to find out more you might want to try these books:
Brown, G Listening to Spoken English (2nd ed) Longman 1990
Cauldwell, R Phonology for Listening www.speechinaction.org 2013
Field, J Listening in the Language Classroom CUP 2008

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