Shrinking and linking (shrinkin_n_linkin) - practical techniques for teaching stress and reduced speech

Jason R Levine

This was the title of a webinar presented by Jason R Levine (@FluencyMC) as part of the recent ELT Techniques MOOC on Listening and Pronunciation.  What follows is a summary of what Jason had to say.

English is a stress-timed language.  This isn't common - most languages are syllable-timed.  We want our students to feel the stress (rhythm) of the language, and can draw their attention to it by using a bold font to show stress, for example.  However,

There's a fine line between raising awareness of pronunciation issues and raising stress (the other meaning!).

We need to raise awareness sufficiently to motivate students and follow up with loads of practice.  We shouldn't fill their heads with loads of rules.  It's usually best to follow the three Rs:

RELAX, REPEAT, REMEMBER

 

The rhythm of English is best described as 3/4, as in a waltz:

123

223

323

423

This is the beat of the language.  For example:

 

Students feel stressed.   (4 syllables)

     S         V       O/C

     1         2         3

 

The students feel stressed.   (5 syllables)

Th' students feel stressed.

 

The students are feeling stressed.   (7 syllables)

Th' students_r feelin' stressed.

 

The students have been feeling stressed.   (8 syllables)

Th' students've bin feelin' stressed.

The word order of subject, verb, object is common in English.  There are times when the word order is different, but these are exceptions - questions, passive structures, for emphasis, negative adverbials, etc.  There is a connection between the almost fixed word order in English and the rhythm of the language.  Because English gravitates to this word order, the rhythm has become 1,2,3.  This doesn't mean that every sentence is 1, 2, 3, but it does mean that this rhythm is always there.  It's in the background.

schwa

In English, unlike most other languages, each word which has more than one syllable, has a syllable which is stressed.  It's important to get learners very familiar with where the stress is - from dictionary use, from listening, and from your instruction.  Don't worry about trying to teach the more complex issues of secondary and tertiary stress.  Once students know where the stress is, the other syllables automatically become unstressed - hence the schwa everywhere!  Syllables reduce to the /ǝ/ and /ı/ sounds all the time.  It's important not to panic students about how they're going to remember all this - just make them familiar with it so that they know what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

Going back to our 'students feel stressed' example, we add in syllables to every sentence and yet the rhythm stays the same.  Just like in music, speed doesn't affect the rhythm.  You can play/say something fast or slowly, but if the time signature is 3/4, then the rhythm stays the same.

In English, when the grammar structures get more complex, they're harder to hear because the grammatical words aren't stressed.  We need to give students much more practice at listening to these kinds of sentences.  We can slow them down, but we must make sure the rhythm is maintained.  To be a fluent listener, we often tell our students they don't need to understand every word - they should focus on the content (stressed) words because they carry the meaning.  This is true, but, in order to be able to speak and write well, they also need to know the grammar words.

 

When teaching pronunciation, we shouldn't really highlight the shrinking and linking.  We should concentrate on the stressed words and, with familiarity with the rhythm of English, the reduced forms automatically become reduced.

 

Some learners think that stress changes according to how formal a situation is.  This is not true!  Stress and intonation are not the same thing. 

 

How many people are there in your family?

How many people_r there_in yr family?

 

What are you going to do on Friday?

What're ya gonna do_on Friday?

 

In these sentences, the stress or rhythm is the same, but the intonation isn't.  Intonation in informal speech (with friends) is very flat and we speak with a lower tone.  In formal situations, we usually speak with a higher tone and more intonation.  The key determiner as to whether someone sounds formal or informal, rude or polite, is INTONATION.

 

Techniques to use in the classroom

 

1.  Highlight word and sentence stress.

 

2.  Have students mark the stress after a listening task.  They already know the vocabulary and have understood the text.  Then they can listen again and mark the stress.

 

3.  Have students mark the stress before a listening task.  They try to predict where it's going to be.  Then they listen to check.

 

4.  Focus on stress in dictations:

• Dictate five sentences of authentic English - read them yourself or use a recording.
• Repeat each sentence at least three times, giving students time to write.  Do not change the speed or stress patterns.
• Ask students to write down the stressed words first.
• Pair students to compare their work and reconstruct the sentences as best they can.
• Elicit the sentences from the students or have them write them on the board.
• Ask students to highlight the word or sentence stress.
• As an extension activity, have students write responses and create dialogues or stories.

Sample dictation

1. What's the weather supposed to be like today?
2. Where do you feel like going for lunch?
3. Tell her we'll meet her around two.
4. Actually, I think I'll stay at home tonight and watch TV.
5. Do you want to meet at the library tomorrow?

Number 3 is particularly difficult - the shrinking and linking is blatant!

 

5.  Use meaningful shadowing and repetition.  Try scenes from movies and TV shows, music videos, commercials, roleplays created by students, scenes from plays and musicals, famous speeches, karaoke, poetry, limericks, jokes, tongue twisters, songs, etc.  When teaching pronunciation, we need to use repetition more as actors would when learning their lines.  Practice makes perfect!!



Joined up listening – how to understand natural speech

Johanna Stirling

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Cambridge University Press and presented by Johanna Stirling.  What follows is a summary of what she had to say.

Why don’t students understand natural speech?

·         It’s too fast for them to process.

·         The words aren’t spoken clearly.

·         They aren’t listening properly.

·         They don’t know all the words.

·         They panic.

The first two are probably the main reasons for non-comprehension.

How do we teach listening?

1. Skills development:

·         predicting

·         listening for gist

·         listening for specific information

·         inferring

2. Practise

These are important, but they are not enough.  Following on from practice, we need to analyse the wrong answers.  We need to find out why students got the answers wrong. 

Micro-listening – receptive pronunciation

It's important to focus on specific parts of what the students have already listened to, as in this example from Face2Face:

Pronunciation is normally associated with speaking, but receptive pronunciation is vital for listening.

Difficulties when listening

1. Ellipsis - incomplete sentences, which are very common in spoken English, are extremely difficult for learners to cope with.  We can give students conversations like this:

 

and ask them to supply what's missing, or give them the whole conversation, listen and cross out what they don't hear:

 

2.  Weak forms - where we have strong stress on one word and the others all get squashed, it is very problematic for learners.  We need to show students weak forms to help with their comprehension.  They don't necessarily have to say it that way themselves, but they need to recognise it.

 





 

 

 

3.  Elision - when we put words together, we often lose the last phoneme.  We need to raise students' awareness of this.

 

 

4.  Linking - it's often difficult to tell where one word ends and another starts - mad_idea_about, for example.  Look at how these combinations can sound to an untrained ear:

 

We should introduce linking to our students at pre-intermediate level at the latest.  It's really never too early to show students what's happening in joined-up speaking.

 

5.  Assimilation - some sounds change when they're near other sounds.  For example, 'sunbathing' sounds like 'some bathing', 'sandwich' becomes 'samwich', and 'handbag' sounds more like 'hambag'.

 

To conclude:

 

We need to make our students aware of all of these anomalies in spoken English through the practice of micro-listening and receptive pronunciation.

 

Reference

 

Listening in the Language Classroom by John Field.







 

 

Practical guidance on training students to cope with authentic spoken English

This was the title of a recent British Council Teaching English seminar presented by Sheila Thorn and what follows is a summary of what she had to say.




Sheila began with a question:

Why are listening comprehension exercises in coursebooks not representative of informal spoken English heard outside the classroom?

• They are scripted - usually because coursebook writers are trying to introduce a language point.
• They are outdated - language changes so quickly.
• The speed of delivery is artificially slow.
• Turn-taking - in authentic speech, people talk over each other all the time.  It's normal!  In coursebook listenings, everyone takes turns nicely!
• There's a lack of hesitation.  Generally, there are no pauses, no fillers, and everyone speaks in full, accurate sentences.
• The accent - coursebook listenings are usually delivered in standard English.  There isn't a range of accents.
• They are recorded in sound studios, so there is no background noise.
• The people speaking are often actors, so are not as natural as people off the street would be.
• They rarely use non-native speakers of English.
• Listening in coursebooks is mainly for modelling purposes so students hear clear examples of structures and vocabulary.

A quote from Michael Rost:

 

'There is a distinction between learning to listen in the L2 and learning the L2 through listening.'

 

Coursebooks are all about learning a language through listening, but it is better to learn to listen in an L2 as a specific skill.

 

Critique of the traditional listening comprehension approach

1. It's non-communicative.
2. It's teacher centred.

• A lot of listening comprehension is testing, not training.  You're seeing how much students understand, but you're not training them to listen any more effectively.
• It's negative reinforcement.  It's always the same students who get things right and the same students who get things wrong.  Students start to feel that they're just rubbish at listening and it's difficult to break through that.
• It's boring!  Just listen and answer questions - boring!!  The texts are bland; nobody dies, nobody's on drugs!
• Listening is intangible.  Unless you've got the tapescript, it's just in the air - you can't grab hold of it.  Therefore, it's difficult for the teacher to work out why a student found it difficult.  Even when students get the right answer, the teacher doesn't know if they got there for the right reasons.
• The focus in traditional listenings is on the product - the things that were said, not how they were said.  It's better to focus on the process of listening rather than the product.
• It's over-reliant on top-down processing.  Telling students just to listen to the main words doesn't really help because those small words give meaning about time, aspect, etc.
• Just exposing students to more listening doesn't really help, either.  They won't just pick it up through osmosis!

The challenges of spontaneous speech

 

Spontaneous speech is easy for us as native speakers.  It's automatic.  For language learners, though, it's rather more difficult.  As Gillian Brown says:

 

'Every consonant and every vowel will be affected by its neighbouring consonants and vowels and by the rhythmic structure in which it occurs.'

 

You don't get dictionary-like, carefully articulated words in a stream of speech.  Something happens to them.  Ellision causes problems for listeners.

 

Some solutions to the problem

• Use short, authentic listenings on a regular basis.
• Practise listening for word recognition - can students hear individual words in a stream of speech?
• Do lots of de-coding practice.
• Do intensive listening activities on short pieces, rather than extensive listening (traditional listening comprehension) on longer pieces.
• Even tracks just a few seconds in length can generate a lot of language activities.
• With both word recognition and de-coding, follow the communicative approach.  Get students in pairs or small groups to work collaboratively on authentic recordings.

Gapping

 

Gapping key lexical/content words in a stream of speech is highly effective. 

• Can students recognise words that you know they already know in a stream of speech?
• Can they recognise functional or grammatical words?  For example, even if they don't hear the ending of a word, can they work it out from context?  For instance, 'She promised to help her with her homework.'  Do students know from context that they need to put the 'd' ending on 'promise' even if they can't hear it?
• By gapping contractions, we can make students aware of how often they feature in natural speech.
• We can use gapping to practise real life minimal pair discrimination.
• We can gap unknown words whose sounds conform to spelling conventions.

Dictation

• We can dictate short authentic extracts and compare the citation form of a word with how that word sounds in a stream of speech.
• We can use instant dictation, as advocated by John Field.  Lots of listening comprehension tests a student's memory.  We are asking them if they can remember what they heard.  In fact, when we're listening, the last ten or so words are still in our active brains - they haven't been processed yet, they are still easily accessible.  So, with instant dictation, play an authentic listening, pause it at random and ask students to write down what they think the last four or five words were that they heard.  This way, we can see how effectively students are listening and they will improve with practice.

Free-style

• Take an authentic listening into class.
• Don't give any set-up or ask any questions.
• Play the listening.
• Ask students - 'How much did you understand?'
• Get them to give you a percentage.  (These percentages should be recorded by the students and used to show their progress over time.)
• Get them to tell you what they think they understood.
• Be non-committal.
• Write the points up on the board.
• Play the listening again.
• Ask students to write down all the words they heard which they think were important.
• Get students in pairs or small groups to construct meaning from the ideas and the word lists.
• Play the listening again and give feedback on how close they were to understanding the meaning.

 

 

 

 

You could go on to a traditional comprehension exercise if you like, but this kind of activity reflects what happens in authentic listening.