Hugh Dellar on pronunciation and listening

This is a good blog from Hugh. I don’t agree with everything in it, but I do agree that one of the main benefits of pronunciation activities can be an improvement in listening. However, we need to recognise (as Celce Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin have mentioned) that the goals for pronunciation and listening are different. The goal for listening has to take account of the fact that what learner listeners have to cope with – outside the classroom – is very messy, wild and unruly. So whereas we can work with tidy examples of speech (compatible with what I call the Careful Speech Model) for the goal of intelligible pronunciation, we need to work with typical (therefore messy, wild, unruly) examples of speech from the real world. I would advocate using the term ‘pronunciation activities’ for those activities which have the goal of intelligibility in speaking, and using a different term such as ‘vocal gymnastics’ (or some such other term) for those activities which have a listening goal. Using the same term to refer to activities in pursuit of different goals is not helpful.