56 – Reasonable hearings

I was recently invited to give a two-day workshop in Moscow on Listening-Decoding. For me, this kind of opportunity is a gift from heaven. And although I found the experience somewhat knackering, my hosts looked after me very well and I experienced the workshop as both an uplifting and energising event.

One of the things I did at the event was to exploit the recordings of Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley’s series Outcomes. This series of course books (Beginner all the way through to Advanced) features recordings – even at the Beginner level – which give both fast and slow versions of the same sentence.

I used one sound file early on in the workshop which comes from the Grammar Reference part of the Beginner Book, and for which the instruction is to ‘Listen and complete the questions – they are fast’. The students see a gapped sentence and asked to complete it – in this case the gapped sentence they saw was the question

‘How much xxx xxxx?’

And here is the sound file:

So of course, the words ‘are they’ should be written in the gap. But I was curious to find out what the sound shapes of ‘are they’ were so I isolated them and cut them out into this sound file:

On hearing this, I thought it sounded close to ‘a day’. So I thought it would be worth experimenting – in the workshop – with this sound file, and ask the participants what words they thought the soundshapes represented. So I played the short file first, and elicited from them – to the whiteboard – what they made of this short sound file. Below is a photograph of the whiteboard.

(I can’t remember why I crossed out a day)

Isn’t that range of hearings wonderful? These are all what I term ‘reasonable hearings’ or ‘alternative hearings’ of the sound substance of this short extract. They represent honest assessments (guesses) as to what the intended words were. So I used this moment to make the ‘hearings’ point that is in my A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding p. 18 and throughout. What I should have done (hindsight moment now) was to get the room to do vocal gymnastics with all of their suggestions. So using the frame ‘How much xxx xxxx’ they substitute all of their suggestions in turn in the gap – starting slow and speeding up but making a mush of the last two syllables:

How much are they; How much did they; How much good day; How much today; How much the bay.
 

Something like this, which goes from Garden to Jungle:

The purpose being, of course, to get familiar and comfortable with the mess and unruliness of the Jungle of natural spontaneous speech, to become better listeners.