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.

Image from here online.

My forthcoming iPad app is going to feature what I refer to as Listening Hotspots, which are moments in spontaneous speech where familiar, frequent words (including weak forms) are mushed out of shape and combined in such a way that are difficult to perceive. This happens in fast stretches of speech: typically those which precede, and lie in between, prominent syllables. Using the multi-touch capabilities of tablets, users will be able to do intensive listening, and improve their ability to perceive such words.

Because of the hotspots, I had thought of calling the app Hot Listening - Cool Pronunciation, but (a) this is too long for those locations in the Apple Store and elsewhere where a shorter, snappier title is important and (b) I got advice to the effect that Hot Listening might be interpreted as being a bit risqué.

But actually, if you do a Google search for images with the search term hot listening, nothing risqué turns up. Interestingly though, I found that a Korean publisher has produced a series of titles under this name - as the image above shows.

Anyway, my current title for the app is Cool Speech with the subtitle Listening Hotspots and Fluent Pronunciation.