More on Listening Hotspots

Had a very exciting meeting at Firsty Group yesterday looking at the latest drafts of the forthcoming iPad app Cool Speech: Listening Hotspots and Cool Pronunciation. Above is a screenshot of one of the images. There’s loads of work to do, and not much time to do it in, but they are utterly (scarily) confident that it can be finished by early December.

The Hotspots section (mentioned in the previous post) is the one that most excites me, as it addresses a huge gap in the teaching of listening. This is what I say about Hotspots in the introduction:

A Hotspot is a moment in a recording that contains familiar words which are difficult to hear because they are spoken so fast. You learn to understand the words in these Hotspots by touching them on-screen. There are three kinds of touch:

You can hear the whole speech unit,

You can tap on the Hotspots, and hear them as they were originally spoken,

You can tap twice on the Hotspots and hear them spoken slowly and carefully.

The purpose is to teach you the relationship between fast unclear speech and slow clear speech, so that you will understand fast speech in everyday life.