Teacher Discussion Forums

I teach ESL at International House and I am also a graduate student in the TESOL program. I am writing the final paper for one of my classes on listening techniques.

What pronunciation features are most salient to listening comprehension?
What techniques can I use to make learners more aware of them?

What I'm thinking of concentrating on is whether or not discrimination of pronunciation helps my students' listening and how. I have to test this on my students and write the results. Does anyone have any ideas of activities, or theories related to topic or personal experience to share?
Could you guide me on where to find information about the topic? Thanks

Angela

Just as a personal observation, I think the ability to hear contractions is extremely important. For example, I've had students with reasonably good English come to me for pre-university work who cannot hear the difference between things such as "can" and can't".

Not definitive I realise but worth considering.

Good luck
Stephen

I think most of the items that help listening comprehension involve more than just individual sounds. The problems usually stem from not understanding how American English links final consonants with the following vowel, how small words are reduced, and how various other reductions are treated. (giving us "gonna" "wanna" "dontcha" etc.)

EFL students in certain countries may understand individual words perfectly well, yet the same words added to a string of other words in a grammatically-correct sentence may be beyond them. For example, Stephen's hint of "can" versus "can't": Chinese students almost invariably fail to hear "can't..." unless for some obvious reason the listener must expect a negative "can't"; in the case of a question such as "can't you understand?" it is not obvious, and it's a rare genius who actually hears the final "T". in "can't".
In my view, these students have problems not so much in identifying individual sounds (vowels or consonants). but in understanding a whole sentence.
A conditio sine qua non for students to "hear" those significant sounds is that the listener anticipates the next sound(s), and that again is conditional on the listener understanding the whole statement.

I have no trouble hearing the difference myself between American can and can't, having grown up watching the occasional American TV. I didn't realize until recently that Americans didn't pronounce the 't', (apparently somthing they have in common with Scots, and Londoners) and I can reproduce it myself. If I'm not mistaken the vowel sound is longer in can't than can, and I think the pitch is also higher.

Pinker writes about the ability of very young babies to hear the difference between various sounds that don't exist in their parents language. As their listening develops, around 12 months, they stop descriminating phonmenic differences that have no importance in their parents language. Again there is unanswered question left dangling in the wind: if students stopped descriminating between certain sounds when they were children, how do you teach them to rediscover these sounds when they are adults?

Iain

dduck wrote:I have no trouble hearing the difference myself between If I'm not mistaken the vowel sound is longer in can't than can, and I think the pitch is also higher.
Iain

I think the vowel sound in "can't" is shorter than the vowel sound in "can" when just pronouncing the words alone. (It's the final voiceless "t" that does it.) However, when the can appears in a regular sentence and is not stressed, it gets reduced to a schwa sound, so it would certainly sound shorter in that case.

Lorikeet