Models of speech

Image from here

Hi Everyone,

Hope you had a good weekend – it was a beautiful autumn weekend here in Birmingham UK – still air, bright sun, multi-coloured leaves. Monday morning however, is very ‘Monday-morning-like’ – dark and damp.

The title of our discussion is ‘Should we integrate the teaching of listening and pronunciation?’

My mind keeps on changing about the answer to this question. Maybe because this is a miserable Monday morning, today my answer is ‘No’.

Because the goals are so different.

The goal of pronunciation is to be internationally intelligible – the achievement of this goal can be done in the Greenhouse and the Garden (to use our metaphor of last week) with the guidelines and rules of careful and connected speech that are in coursebooks.

The goal of listening is to be able to cope with and understand anything that comes your way via your ears. And the achievement of this goal requires familiarity and comfort with what happens in the Jungle. And the guidelines of rules in our course books are not adequate, because (despite the increasing use of unscripted recordings in course books) the Careful Speech Model dominates, and is an obstacle to the learning of listening.

We therefore need to distinguish between two models of speech: The Careful Speech model (for pronunciation) and the Spontaneous Speech Model for listening.

Below is an extract from a table from my forthcoming ‘Phonology for Listening’ which lists some of the differences between the two models.

Grateful for any comments, disagreements, or additions!

 

Careful Speech Model Greenhouse/Garden	Spontaneous Speech Model Jungle
Differences which are important in grammar are audible	Differences which are important in grammar are inaudible
Different tenses sound different‘She’s sold’/ ‘She sold’ ‘They’d bought it’/ ‘They bought it’	Different tenses sound identical‘She sold’/‘She sold’ ‘They bought it’/‘They bought it’
Negative morphemes are clearly heard ‘could go/couldn’t go’ ‘very illegal/very legal’	Negative morphemes are close to inaudible ‘kung go’ ‘verrilegal’
Pairs such as ‘my train’ and ‘might rain’ are clearly distinguished.	Pairs such as ‘my train’ and ‘might rain’ sound identical.
Pairs such as ‘in the garden’ and ‘in a garden’ are clearly distinguished.	Pairs such as ‘in the garden’ and ‘in a garden’ are identical ‘inner garden.