1.

UNKNOWN WORDS AND STRUCTURES

Does the text contain words or structures that the students have never met before? If so, are
they essential or non-essential to the meaning of the whole, inferable or non-inferable (1). If
essential and non-inferable, they will inevitably block general comprehension. However, they
may do so even if they are inferable or non-essential.

If the brain meets an unfamiliar word, it is going to need to devote more time and energy to
processing that word than if it is familiar. Whether the processing means recognizing it is non-
essential, or whether it means actively working out the meaning, the time and energy devoted
to doing so is inevitably taken away from processing the continuing text. The listener may
therefore lose the thread of the text at least momentarily. This may be non-conscious, or in
some cases the listeners may find themselves consciously thinking “What was that word?”
rather than going on listening.

2. FAMILIAR WORDS BUT UNFAMILIAR CONCEPTS

It’s sometimes possible to understand every word in a text but still fail to understand the
meaning. This came home to me the other day when I came across the following text :
For those of you who have been trying to build client-side GData mashups but have been
thwarted by the same-origin policy, we have some good news for you.

Apart from the G in Gdata, it’s not the individual words I don’t understand but their contextual
meaning. How is the data being mashed up? Same origin of what?

For the learner, this lack of knowledge may not be technical (as here), but cultural.

For example :
My neighbour runs every day, and she’s got her bus pass, so I thought – if she can do it, why
not me?

Here, the reference to the bus pass would seem, taken at face value, to indicate that the
woman could easily take the bus to get to where she wants to go – she doesn’t need to run.
Only cultural knowledge tells you that it’s actually a reference to the fact that she’s over 60.

3. MEANING EXPRESSED THROUGH STRESS AND INTONATION

 Meaning is often expressed through stress and intonation in English. For example , in the
sentence I can’t see you tomorrow the meaning if is different depending on whether the stress
is on I (= I can’t see you, but someone else can), on tomorrow (= but I can see you another
day) or on can’t (= so forget about it). If this type of feature does not exist in the student’s own
language, it may not be picked up and the speaker’s meaning misunderstood.

4. UNEXPECTED LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

In the classroom, students have very little contact with authentic conversational English. Most
of what they meet is either written text, scripted text or teacher-student discourse which, as
was suggested in another article (2) is different in type from other forms of discourse. Students
are therefore relatively unfamiliar with many features of natural conversation – exclamations
(My goodness! For heavens sake!) fillers (I mean, as I say, I reckon, mind you) vague general
words (sort of, thingy, stuff, wotsit) hesitations, false starts and repetition ( But the thing I liked,
liked a lot was – erm, do you remember that thing we saw, that sort of umbrella thingy? )
ungrammatical sentences and grammatical patterns which are specific to the spoken
language, for example question tags and repeated subjects in final position : … but they get a
lot of holidays, don’t they, teachers? Another feature which can cause problems is ellipsis – the
omission of items that would generally be included in the written language. For example, in the
exchange - A :What time are you going to Richmond tomorrow? B :I don’t know. About eight. -
both are in the question and I in the answer might well be omitted.

5. UNEXPECTED PRONUNCIATION FEATURES

If listeners are not expecting words to be pronounced in the way they actually are, this also
adds to the processing load. This may happen for three reasons :

Firstly, the learners may mispronounce the word themselves and be expecting their own
version. A student of mine recently failed to understand the word Friday because she was
expecting "freeday"

Secondly, they may know how the word is pronounced in one accent, but not recognise it when
pronounced with a different accent – some intermediate students of mine were once thrown by
hearing the northern British pronunciation of book /buk/.

However, the biggest problem by far tends to be not the pronunciation of lexical items like
these, but the natural features of connected speech. These are :
Elision - the dropping of a sound. This happens frequently with /t/ and /d/ in word final position
- for instance went round to becomes /wen raun tu/.
Vowel weakening – this can also be seen in the last example where the schwa (3) substitutes
for the strong vowel /u/ . It’s probably the most well known of the changes, and is as a
substitute for various vowels - for, at, but etc

Assimilation – a change in one sound to make it phonologically closer to an adjacent sound

and therefore easier to pronounce –Great Britain may become Grape Britain.
Linking between words - this may involve consonant/vowel linking – went out /wen taut/ - or
in the case of two adjacent vowels the inclusion of a linking consonant /j/, /r/ or /w/. Thus, go
and see becomes "gowen see"
This last example shows that these features are often used in conjunction. Here we had the
linking /w/, the use of the schwa, and elision of the final /d/.

Putting all these features together in fact means that the apparently simple exchange about
Richmond used as an example above may end up sounding like :

A : Whadaim yer goina Richmond temorrer. B : Dunno. Boudeight.

Again, native speakers are expecting these changes. They are able to take the reduced
message and non-consciously “fill in the gaps”. In fact, if you say the exchange above to a
native speaker and ask them to write it down, they’ll produce the full, well-formed sentence –
including completely omitted words like are. Although their ears can’t have heard the omitted
sounds and words, their brain was able to process the message immediately, and “heard” what
was in fact not there.