Listening Cherry 01 – Exploring recordings with mp3cut

Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues - from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 1 features a report from a Hong Kong classroom by James Pengelley.

One of the problems with the way teachers are trained to teach listening (in ELT) is that they are encouraged not to engage with the details of the sound substance of a recording (cf. my Grasping the nettle… here, and Phonology for Listening Chapter 16 here). We are told that research into listening in L1 shows that L1 listeners operate at the level of meaning, and do not listen to every word. The false conclusion is drawn that we should therefore encourage our students not to listen for every word, they should (after contextual preparation) listen for the stressed words, and seek to build meanings, and thereby understand. This is fine, but it ignores the learning opportunities offered by the recording as to how English sounds – it avoids the teaching and learning of the sound substance of the language.

Of course I would not want my students to inspect the soundshapes of every word in a three-minute recording. But it is worth spending a couple of minutes of class-time dipping in to a recording, and observing the sound shapes of words (they vary a huge amount). A colleague in Hong Kong, James Pengelley has alerted me to software available online, that makes it very easy to do this.

The software is mp3cut. You can move very quickly backwards and forwards through a recording to find an appropriate second or two to focus on, and to repeat it as often as you judge useful. As you will see from the website, it is easy to make ring tones for your iPhone from any recording. So (the thought occurred to me) if you have a class with many iPhone owners, you could set them the task of making a ringtone each from a particular recording – and get them to give it as a dictation to a fellow student.

James used it somewhat differently. Here’s what he said:

I had to cover a CAE class last night and was asked to do a listening practice with the group – we spent close to 2:15 hours on 3 practice questions and I used mp3cut.net to cut up the audios for them.

I first introduced them to the ‘and…and…and’ excerpt [sound file 8.2 from Phonology for Listening ] from the session on Wednesday and then we listened once and then spliced sections relating to the answers and then listened, repeated, spliced, counted the syllables, did some mini dictations….it was really interesting for them.

One of the students even commented that she felt listening in this way helped to her to understand why listening is so difficult for her, and where the mis-listenings come from and how some of the words change and how her brain reconstructs what she actually hears. It was a very interesting class – thought you’d appreciate the story 🙂