Listening Cherry 27 – Sight and sound shapes
Imagine that every time you see a word written down it looks different: letters in a different order, letters missing, different fonts, different sizes, different use of caps and lower case. Additionally, imagine that the spacing (or lack of it) between words varies according to the speed at which the author originally wrote them. So if the author wrote very fast, many words would squash up close together so that they become a disheartening, difficult-to-decipher mess of word-on-top-of word. And if the author wrote very slowly, pausing to think after every couple of words, the letters of each word would be widely spaced and the words themselves would move apart leaving annoyingly big gaps.
Sight shapes
Imagine, to put it differently, that words have different sight shapes every time you see them on the page. This would add to our workload as teachers and textbook writers, but we would teach this, and we would seek to find useful generalisations and patterns in the varying sight shapes. We would teach this because we (and our students) could see the words, they would exist to be inspected, analysed, studied and learned. They would be in sight, and very much in mind. We could assemble all the different sound shapes of a given word, and put them in a visual learnable sequence.
Of course, in reality, words have very few sight shapes, and these are easily learned: they do not change shape according to the speed that author writes: they do not suffer squashing, squeezing or elongations. And if sight shapes present a difficulty, then they still have the immense advantage of staying in the same place on the page – in sight – so that we can work on deciphering them.
Sound shapes
These shapings (squashing, squeezing, elongations) happen to the sound shapes of words. (All words have a wide variety of sound shapes – not just the ‘weak forms’.) And the trouble is, because that they are not visible or inspectable we don’t teach, study, or learn them. They are out of sight, and therefore out of mind.
Out of sight, out of mind
Our students, cannot (with conventional print plus audio) point to the sound shapes and say ‘Look at them – tell me why they are like that!’ Teachers cannot say ‘Look at this sound shape, it is one of the many sound shapes of the word produced‘
You might think we could do all this with the transcript of a recording, but unfortunately words have the same sight shape each time they occur in the transcript. The sight shape version of a recording – the transcript – is thus a misrepresentation of the recording, and the sound shapes that it contains.
One way forward might be to find ways to help our students point to the sound shapes and say ‘Look at them – tell me why they are like that!’ and to help teachers say ‘Look at this sound shape, it is one of the many sound shapes of the word produced‘ (see here).
But we have to be careful using the verb ‘look’. Any sight shape version of a word – including phonetic versions – misrepresents the sound shape. ‘Looking’ may help, but the audio, the sound shapes have to be immediately accessible. The imperative needs to be ‘Listen!’ – or (better) ‘Look and listen!’ with the sight shapes and sound shapes either embedded in each other (as in the Flash movies you can find here), or placed side by side, as can be done in Sonocent’s AudioNotetaker (see here). There has to be immediacy of access to the different sound shapes of a word.
Although main course textbooks and contemporary listening methodology does not yet include these things, examples of what needs to become orthodoxy can be found in Hancock and McDonald’s Authentic Listening here and here, and in my own work here, here and here.
(NB Some of these links require you to play Flash Movies, which – in Safari – you may need to enable.)
