Image from here.

‘Vocal gymnastics’ is the term used in my current work to refer to activities which serve the goal of improving the students’ listening, but which involve them in using their voices. To an naive observer, the activities will look and sound like pronunciation activities which practise the bad habits of being unclear, unintelligible, and incomprehensible.

But I prefer to avoid using ‘pronunciation’ when talking about such listening activities, precisely because it is so strongly associated with ideas of clarity, intelligibility, and correctness.

Much of the speech that students have to listen to in everyday life is unruly, unpredictable, and messy – quite the opposite of the speech style we want them to emulate in their pronunciation and speaking. So the vocal gymnastics activities are quite specifically not designed to help students become more intelligible in their own speech. On the contrary, these activities are designed to help students become familiar and comfortable with the fast messy speech that they will encounter in real life.

So what do these exercises consist of? They typically focus on on a ‘key phrase’ which is a short group of words (e.g. ‘so you won’t be’, ‘where there were’). Each key phrase is used to illustrate the difference between the Greenhouse, Garden and Jungle forms of words - for example the fact that consonants or syllables are often dropped (‘consonant death’, ‘syllable death’). For more on Greenhouse/Garden/Jungle see here.

Teachers conduct students saying the different forms of the key phrase in choral drills, in rounds and in ping-pong activities. The Greenhouse/Garden/Jungle forms are first presented in tables such as Table 1 below. The Greenhouse (citation) forms are given in column 1 in both orthographic and in phonetic symbols; the middle column gives the Garden version with rules of connected speech applied (in this case elision of ‘t’ of ‘won’t’ and the ‘n’ becoming ‘m’ before ‘b’); and column 3 has the Jungle version, with ‘so you’ becoming a single syllable and the ‘m’ of column 2 disappearing. The three forms of the bottom row are presented in a recording, and after listening several times, students are asked to repeat all three forms at the same time and the same speed as the recording.

Table 1

Greenhouse	Garden	Jungle
SO YOU WON’T BE	SO you WONE.be	syu.wo.be
soʊ.juː.woʊnt.bi	soʊ.jə.woʊn(woʊm).bi	sjə.woʊ.bi

Then attention turns to Table 2 below, where there are two options for classroom activities (actually, with language presented in a table there are a larger number of options, but I shall focus on just two): the round, and ping-pong.

Table 2

	1	2	3	4
GRN	SO	YOU	WON’T	BE
GDN	SO you	WONE be	HERE	THEN
JNG	syu.wo.be HERE then	syu.wo.be HERE then	syu.wo.be HERE then	syu.wo.be HERE then

(For this section of the blog, as it is a set of instructions, I will go into instructional mode, and use ‘you’ and imperatives).

The round

For the round, divide the class into three large groups (e.g. left, middle, right) and explain that you are a musical conductor, and that they are to start reading the table, starting at row 1, and then proceeding to rows 2 and 3, following your beat. When the left-hand group starts row 2, you get the middle group to start row 1, and when the middle group starts row two, (the left-hand group will now be on the last - Jungle - row) you get the right-hand group to start row 1. The idea is to have a cloud of sound with the three different ways of saying the key phrase happening simultaneously. Then, after this whole class mode, ask students, in groups of three, to do the same round.

Ping pong

For the ping pong activity, tell the class to imagine they are holding a ping-pong bat (table tennis bat), and that for each word they say, they simultaneously play an imaginary forehand or backhand. First of all, it will be you the teacher against all of the class. Explain that you, and they, will take turns to say the words in row 1. So you will say the words in columns 1 and 3, and they will say the words in 2 and 4. Start by doing an exaggerated mime of a ping-pong serve - a high toss with back-spin serve and say SO as you ‘hit’ the ball slowly towards the class, and they do a slow return as they say YOU, and so on through the cells and rows of the table, continuing from the top, going through the whole table and speeding up each time through. Then ask them to do this in pairs.

The purpose of this activity is to embed the different soundshapes of the key phrase in the students’ medium and long-term memories so that they can become more proficient listeners.

It will be quite noisy, and also quite fun! Encourage students to think about this exercise whenever they are walking somewhere, and to think of, and repeat to themselves this vocal gymnastics exercise quietly to themselves to the rhythm of their walk. This will result in an ear worm, a rhythmic unit of fast speech which will continue to replay (wanted or unwanted) in their memories for a while, thereby helping them become more familiar and comfortable with the realities of spontaneous everyday speech.

So - not pronunciation, but vocal gymnastics.

Thanks to Sue Sullivan, Sheila Thorn, and Annie McDonald for the ideas behind this post.

 

Image from here.

One of the technical terms that I use in teacher workshops is ‘mush’. By ‘mush’ I mean the messy rush of non-prominent syllables in the stream of speech, where the sound shapes of words are so distorted, and pass by so quickly that learners find it impossible to handle. Expert and native listeners have no problems with the mush - they are experts in meaning perception. Unless, that is, they are teachers of listening, when they do have a problem - they (despite being experts in perception) are unaware of the fact that much of the stream of speech is a messy mush.

This non-awareness is a partial cause of one of the failings in current practice in listening pedagogy, the assumption there is nothing ‘linguistic’ to teach - no content which is unique to listening, no teachable items that are not covered elsewhere in the other syllabuses of ELT, such as grammar and vocabulary.

Instead, in current listening pedagogy, there is testing (answers to get correct), there is an over-focus on communicative (coping) strategies, there is the gradual acquisition of competence through extensive listening (‘exposure’), there is unknown vocabulary to cope with, but no ‘facts’ about the sound substance of speech.

We test understanding through listening comprehension, we practice skills through exposure to help learners cope with the sound substance (stream) of speech. But we don’t teach them the facts of the substance of speech, and we don’t (despite all our strategy training techniques) give them a handle on the mush.

There is something ‘linguistic’ to teach, there are facts about the sound substance of the stream of speech which are teachable, and there are techniques (‘vocal gymnastics’) which enable students to get a handle on the mush.

Here are some some examples of facts:

• the words ‘and that’ often sound like ‘annat’
• the words ‘in the’ often sound like ‘inner’ (i.e. identical to ‘in a’)
• the word ‘probably’ can sound like ‘probooly’ or ‘prowubbly’ or ‘prolly’
• ‘middle’ can sound like ‘mill’

And vocal gymnastics? Come to my talk at IATEFL Birmingham on Saturday 16th April 2016 at 11:10 to experience the gymnastics. (Leotards are not required).

Image from here.

I find the word ‘and’ fascinating - indeed I am something of an ‘and’ nerd. The word features in Chapter 8 of Phonology for Listening, in a short recording of spontaneous speech in which six of the eight speech units begin with ‘and’ - with five different sound shapes.

Recently I became aware recently that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 has ten of the fourteen lines beginning with the word ‘and’:

Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

It’s not the easiest of his sonnets to understand, but basically it’s a complaint about the injustices of a world where deserving virtuous people are downtrodden/displaced by undeserving non-virtuous people (the long list beginning in line 2 and ending with line 12). The list of examples of the triumph of the undeserving is framed by a wish for death (lines 1 and 13) which is then tempered by the realisation (line 14) that death will mean separation from the loved one. Enough of explication.

I have three recordings of this Sonnet by Dame Edith Evans (1888-1976), Sir Anthony Quayle (1913-1989), and David Shaw Parker, who is still working as an actor and voice artist.

And (of course!) I am interested in the different soundshapes of the word ‘and’ across the three recordings.

Here are the ten ‘and’s from Dame Edith Evans

and and and and and and and and and and

Here are the ten ‘and’s from Sir Anthony Quayle

and and and and and and and and and and

Here are the ten ‘and’s from David Shaw Parker

and and and and and and and and and and

I don’t have dates for the recordings, but I think it is safe to assume that the order in which I have listed them is the order in which the three recordings were made. To my ears the earliest recording, by Edith Evans, uses a smaller range of sound shapes than the second recording by Anthony Quayle, who in turn uses fewer than the last recording by David Shaw Parker.

These being recordings of poetry read aloud, I had expected less variation than one would find in recordings of spontaneous speech. This seems to be so for the earliest of the three recordings, by Dame Edith Evans but not for the second (Anthony Quayle) and third (David Shaw Parker).

I am not a trained phonetician, so I do not dare publicise my attempts at capturing the different sound shapes of ‘and’ in phonetic transcription. But if you have an advanced phonetics class, and you are as much of an ‘and’ nerd as I am, you can download a worksheet here and have the class do transcriptions. If you have the expertise and time to do an authoritative transcription yourself - please tell me, and send it to me! [email protected]