By Jono Ryan - Head of Materials Development
Just like catch phrases and memes in popular culture, certain lines get picked up and widely quoted in ELT circles. One that I keep spotting is this from Nunan (1997, p. 47):
“Listening is the Cinderella skill in second language learning. All too often, it has been overlooked by its elder sister – speaking.”
Google Scholar gives 30 separate hits for the whole quote (Nunan himself used it in several publications dating to 1997), 101 for “Listening is the Cinderella skill” and hundreds more for combinations of ‘listening’ and ‘Cinderella skill’. Admittedly some of these predate Nunan’s description. Undoubtedly, it’s an appealing metaphor, but there’s also something appealing about the sentiment.
As a teacher, I’ve often looked at listening materials and wondered, ‘is that it? Set the scene, pre-teach the vocab, play the audio and check answers?’ The options for teaching writing seem endless, the options for listening seem minimal.
And at the same time, students often struggle with listening the most. For many, listening in the classroom seems fine – they understand the teacher and the audios from their textbook, and they might easily pass their assessments – but outside the classroom it starts falling to pieces. There are probably a lot of things going on here, but part of the trouble stems from almost exclusive classroom exposure to speech that is highly precise and careful in its enunciation. This is true of coursebook materials and a lot of teacher talk.
In dealing with this, an approach that I’ve been having a lot of success with in the classroom – and which we are incorporating into our new series The Last Hustle – is working with ideas from Richard Cauldwell’s stimulating and highly recommended book ‘A syllabus for listening – Decoding’ (2018).
Cauldwell introduces helpful metaphors for the articulation of speech, distinguishing the contexts of ‘the greenhouse’, ‘the garden’ and ‘the jungle’. In the greenhouse, plants are in an idealized form, raised in separate plant pots, watered, manicured, and shielded from being crowded out by more vigorous plants. This corresponds to the dictionary-like phonological form of words: clear, crisp, and shielded from the influence of sounds from surrounding words and from various communicative pressures, such as the desire for speed and efficiency.
Things are a bit different in the garden. There, plants have more scope for filling their ecological niche, competing to some extent with neighboring plants but still in arrangements that are orderly, neat, and under control. This corresponds to the careful production of scripted utterances found in textbooks, where the sounds are still relatively crisp and orderly – and still somewhat unnatural – yet the sounds of adjacent words are allowed to exert a degree of influence, and where weak forms and other features of connected speech make an appearance.
In the jungle, there is no gardener to insist on orderliness. There’s still an underlying orderliness, but it comes from nature. Plants grow in less predictable ways, reaching the maximum state their genetics can allow in the fickle environment they find themselves, sometimes crowded out, sometimes taking surging ahead. The jungle conditions of human speech are equally wild, with pressures exerted by various contextual factors, and given specific flavors by the voices, personalities, and moment by moment emotions of the speaker.
Following Cauldwell’s suggestion, I’ve introduced these metaphors to my students and set activities for them to discover the systematic patterns accounting for how over-enunciated teacher talk becomes swiftly flowing street talk. It’s been really successful.
So now, I’m really looking forward to bringing this approach into our work with video drama in our new series The Last Hustle, providing ‘a way in’ to the unpredictable and ‘mushy’ sounds of ordinary speech. For each episode, we select several lines for close listening, each presented in three versions: one a little closer to the garden end of the spectrum, one in the middle, and one closer to the jungle. These support comprehension and teach about some of the regularities in how sounds shift and meld in real life speech.
I’ll be posting many more thoughts on listening pedagogy in the future, but right now I’m convinced that the big gap in most classes I observe is a systematic approach to addressing phonology.
References
Cauldwell, R. (2018). A syllabus for listening - Decoding. Speech In Action.
Nunan, D. (1997). Listening in langauge learning. The Language Teacher, 23(9), 47-51.