Listening cherry 22 – Wow! Sue Sullivan’s speech stream

Sue Sullivan at IATEFL 2016 – Birmingham

Real live language – Speech stream and the brain box

Sue won a scholarship from International House, ‘Brita Haycraft Better Spoken English Scholarship’ to attend this conference (she lives and teaches in Christchurch New Zealand).

IH people were delighted with her talk, as was the attractive young lady who sat next to me during the talk – the only time we made eye-contact was right at the end, and she went ‘Wow!’

And it wasn’t my good looks that she went ‘Wow’ to. Below explains her ‘wow’.

Sue teaches adult immigrants, and part of her teaching involves ‘Speechstream’ work. She takes videos of TV programmes, and finds bits of fast speech that her students can neither understand nor de-code. (Sue says: ‘When they can’t hear it, rejoice!’). This is a wonderful circumstance, the perfect opportunity for learning. She gets the class to mimic the non-understood speech stream (Sue calls it a ‘gleep’) – they do it vocally, and with hand and arm gestures. This voice gym work is bottom-up processing without understanding. She wants the the non-understanding and pre-verbal handling to go on for some time, and she delays the resolution into words. The reasons for pre-verbal processing & no written word is to prevent the L1 language system (its pronunciation component) engaging with its suppositions about speech. She explained that working in this way forces open the 1st language learning processor.

The justification for this approach takes us into the brain – away from the bits that do conscious learning, to the basal ganglia – the location of control of those muscle movements that are not deliberate. Sue argues that the substance of language is physical – hence the vocal mouthing, and hand/arm gestures.

Sue says ‘Maybe five minutes of voice gym work and then resolve into words and meaning’. She also asserts (I love this bit) ‘When they want to understand too early, this is an obstacle to learning.’

Student reactions: the students sometimes say that in later hearings the recording has been slowed down – when in fact it has not, they are simply riding along comfortably with the wave of the stream of speech at a speed they are now familiar with. She teaches them other language skills as well, but this ‘speech stream’ work is something they ask for repeatedly.

Wow indeed. (Sadly, I never saw the ‘wow-er’ again).

Image from here