Listening Cherry 07 – Authentic Listening

Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues - from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 7 raves about a recent publication from Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald.

There is so much to like and admire about Authentic Listening Resource Pack, the latest offering from Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald. Some facts first:

• Authentic Listening Resource Pack
• 144 pages, A4 size, two data CDs with audio, one DVD-video
• 45 two-page units, scripts for all the recordings, and an answer key
• The pages of the book are photocopiable
• Recordings come from radio programmes, videos of popular lectures
• ‘Vox pop’ and ‘informal discussion’ videos made for this publication
• The 45 units have 4 or 5 sections
• Each section has up to 15 activities/tasks per recording (but normally 12)
• Tasks ‘are achievable’ for students around the B1/B2 level

So as you can guess from this list this is an amazing publication, just in terms of the amount of work that has gone into producing it.

But what I most like about it is that there is a substantial focus on the nature of the sound substance of spontaneous speech. This can be seen and heard most obviously in the ‘Tuning in’ tasks which occur in most units, and in the nine ‘Pronunciation for Listening’ units, which are placed so that they occur every fifth unit. These units use micro-listening and audio-concordancing techniques to teach learners the true nature of spontaneous speech. Here’s a rough guide to the first three ‘Pronunciation for Listening’ units.

• unit 5 – thinking time noises ‘um’, and stretched words (what I call ‘stepping stones’ in Phonology for Listening), and repetitions
• unit 10 – ‘crowded syllables’ (what I call ‘squeeze zones’) where words are mushed up together between prominent syllables
• unit 15 – rushed adverbs ‘actually’, plus ‘sort of’ ‘kind of’ and ‘just’

These ‘Pronunciation for Listening’ units use carefully selected extracts from the recordings – very short, often repeated a few times, and sometimes slowed down (awesome!). They really help teachers and students get ‘up close and personal’ with the sound substance of speech. There’s something to teach, something to learn.

Lastly, Mark has been for a long time an expert at using inventive spellings both to represent the distorted sounds which are very common in connected speech, and to help with exercises which help learners learn the realities of everyday speech. I love this example from unit 40: ‘jeck’n’ for ‘do you reckon’.

Brilliant stuff. A wonderful demonstration of the fact that, in the listening class, there is plenty to teach, and plenty to learn, about the sound substance of speech.

Next blog-post, I’ll focus on a short recording from Authentic Listening.