There is one major prerequisite for becoming an effective user of a language. (Being a prerequisite means that it is an essential requirement before you can start doing anything meaningful.) This prerequisite is ‘substance mastery’. By this I mean mastery of the substances of both writing and speech, the ability to form (in writing and speaking), and to perceive (in reading and listening) the words that you and other people write or say. Substance mastery is that essential something which precedes the tasks of sharing and understanding meanings.*

In the Listening Cherry 28, I used the terms sight shapes and sound shapes to refer to the different physical forms (marks on a surface, streams of sound) that we employ to create and understand language. In my work on A Syllabus for Listening (forthcoming 2017) I find that I need both these terms and the terms sight substance and sound substance to refer respectively to (a) writing, or graphic matter in general and (b) the stream of speech, the acoustic matter, of language.

In A Syllabus for Listening my focus will be helping students learn to decode the sound substance of language, so that they can perceive the words intended and uttered by the speaker, and thence proceed to build and understand meanings. Although the end goal of learning to listen to language is understanding, my focus will be on the means of getting to that goal.

This focus is needed, because one of the problems with the current orthodoxy around the teaching of listening is that we practise goal behaviour, rather than take students step by step from their starting point as learner-listeners through a programme of learning which will gradually equip them with the knowledge and skills to enable them to become increasingly expert listeners. A Syllabus for Listening will be a book which presents the knowledge and skills that can be used to help them on their learning journey to become efficient listeners.

‘Sight substance’ refers to the visual, graphic shape of words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that are perceived by the eyes. The sight substance exists on paper, computer screens, boards and walls - anywhere where print can be presented to the eye. It hangs around, it doesn’t disappear, it can be read, inspected and returned to.

‘Sound substance’ refers to the auditory, acoustic shapes of words, word clusters, speech units and longer stretches of speech that are perceived by the ears. And in contrast to the sight substance, the sound substance does not have a stable existence: it happens and it is gone. It happens at speeds that the listener cannot usually control. It passes through short-term memory and is continually replaced by the sound substance which follows. Unless it has been recorded, it cannot be inspected at leisure, it cannot be re-found.

In the sight substance, word recognition is generally very easy, but in the sound substance it is much less easy. Crucially, if there is a decoding difficulty in the sight substance, the substance stays in sight so that you can devote as much time as you like to working out which word it is. So even if you are having to learn a new script (Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean, the IPA) the script stays still, in sight, so that you can study it.

However in the sound substance of speech, words occur as a continuous blur of sound, any section of which has only a momentary existence: occurring and disappearing being replaced by more speech. It is never in sight; and out of sight, it is very quickly out of mind.

As a native listener we easily perceive words in the sound substance. In fact, with native listening we seem not to require precise perception - which is good, because what occurs in the stream of speech is rarely precise. The perceptual skills are a prerequisite, but it often seems that once we have acquired these prerequisite skills, we can operate at the level of meaning without having to give attention to the level of decoding.

But in a language we are learning, when we are not yet able to operate at the level of meaning, we need to give greater amounts of attention to the level of/work of perception (bottom up decoding) of the stream of speech. And language teaching deficient in this area.

If we had similar perceptual difficulties with the sight substance, the written language, we would do something about it. We would have to, because learners could point to things and ask ‘What is that? Why is it shaped like that?’

And the thing they are asking about stays on the page. If you don’t help them, they can walk with the book to the Director of Studies and point to the page and complain that you cannot explain something they want to know, and that you should be dismissed, because you know nothing about the language.

And actually, as a profession, ELT is guilty of knowing close to nothing of the true nature of the sound substance of normal everyday speech. We think we know about it, but what we actually know is a sight substance representation - the misrepresentations of printed orthography.

*This is not necessarily true of L1 language use between expert speaker/listeners, where there is a much more complex relationship between perception and understanding.

In this blog I will attempt to demonstrate, using distorted orthography, the difficulties involved in learning to listen in a language in which you are not yet expert (second language learning). First, I need to tell you about Anna’s anger.

Anna is a friend of mine (a very prominent professor of English) whose first language was not English, she had to learn it at school. When she was a student, she hated the approach of one of her teachers to listening lessons. And she told me:

…I’ve hated the underuse of the material. I’ve … answered three silly questions … then someone tells me patronisingly (it IS bloody patronising) that the rest doesn’t matter. Well it does if I want to learn the language!

Let’s explore the kind of classroom activity that might have made her angry. Because this is a written blog (in sight substance) I am going to transpose her listening comprehension activity into a reading comprehension exercise (using distorted orthography) on a very short text.

Here is the teacher’s introduction (remember I am recreating in reading-activity form what was a listening activity, so this is not actuality).

You will read about a young woman, Emily, who was given a teaching job in a school in South Africa. She had gone there to work as a young volunteer, at the age of eighteen, before coming back to the UK to enter university. Read the following questions - there are three choices of answer, and then read - scan - the text to find the answers.

1. What subject was she given to teach? (a) Maths (b) English or (c) Technology
2. How many pupils were in the school? (a) 500 (b) 1500 (c) 2000
3. How many times did the word ‘teacher’ occur? (a) Once (b) Twice (c) Three times

(What you are looking at, and inspecting, is a blurred version of an orthographic transcription. There are a few differences from normal orthography: upper case letters are for prominent syllables, and lower case letters are for non-prominent syllables – the mush of speech.)

Having given the students time to arrive at answers, the teacher would then ask the class what they thought the answers were, and praise them for getting the answers which are:

1. What subject …? (c) Technology
2. How many pupils …? (b) 1500
3. How many times … ‘teacher’? (b) Twice

If our teacher were Anna’s teacher, he/she would move on to another activity – refusing to answer any other questions, because, having arrived at the answers, there is – in his/her view nothing else to do. The communicative act of arriving at an understanding of the meaning has been achieved, so the teacher believes that their work is done as far as this activity is concerned.

But remember that Anna wants to learn the language. And because (in this blog) the language is presented as sight substance (albeit blurred), it remains available for inspection. This is completely unlike sound substance, which will have departed the scene, and would therefore be invisible. Out of sight, out of mind - ignorable.

Because (in our imaginary scenario) Anna is looking at sight substance, she and her fellow students can point to the blur and ask: ‘What does this mean?’ But actually (and this is the point) they are more likely to ask ‘What are these words? Because picking out the words in this blurred sight substance is difficult.

Anna’s desire to learn the language is not satisfied by having done the communicative task of answering the questions. She wants to stay with the substance, and improve her ability to recognise words in the substance.

So rather than walk away from the substance, what could Anna’s teacher have done in the listening lesson? (We now revert to sound substance). The answer is simple: stay with the sound substance of the recording. Always, always, always allow time for this question:

Now that you know the answers, listen again, and try and identify the words that lead to the correct answers.

Then, always always always, do something with a short extract (which either you or your students choose) and go to work on it. Ask them how the words in the selected extract sound to them, and tell them how they sound to you. Do vocal gymnastics (see here), get them to savour different ways of saying the words: different speeds, different accents, severely reduced, extra carefully elongated. Encourage them to create raps, or ear-worms. (More on this in future blogs, and in A Syllabus for Listening (forthcoming).

Imagine that every time you see a word written down it looks different: letters in a different order, letters missing, different fonts, different sizes, different use of caps and lower case. Additionally, imagine that the spacing (or lack of it) between words varies according to the speed at which the author originally wrote them. So if the author wrote very fast, many words would squash up close together so that they become a disheartening, difficult-to-decipher mess of word-on-top-of word. And if the author wrote very slowly, pausing to think after every couple of words, the letters of each word would be widely spaced and the words themselves would move apart leaving annoyingly big gaps.

Sight shapes

Imagine, to put it differently, that words have different sight shapes every time you see them on the page. This would add to our workload as teachers and textbook writers, but we would teach this, and we would seek to find useful generalisations and patterns in the varying sight shapes. We would teach this because we (and our students) could see the words, they would exist to be inspected, analysed, studied and learned. They would be in sight, and very much in mind. We could assemble all the different sound shapes of a given word, and put them in a visual learnable sequence.

Of course, in reality, words have very few sight shapes, and these are easily learned: they do not change shape according to the speed that author writes: they do not suffer squashing, squeezing or elongations. And if sight shapes present a difficulty, then they still have the immense advantage of staying in the same place on the page - in sight - so that we can work on deciphering them.

Sound shapes

These shapings (squashing, squeezing, elongations) happen to the sound shapes of words. (All words have a wide variety of sound shapes - not just the ‘weak forms’.) And the trouble is, because that they are not visible or inspectable we don’t teach, study, or learn them. They are out of sight, and therefore out of mind.

Out of sight, out of mind

Our students, cannot (with conventional print plus audio) point to the sound shapes and say ‘Look at them - tell me why they are like that!’ Teachers cannot say ‘Look at this sound shape, it is one of the many sound shapes of the word produced‘

You might think we could do all this with the transcript of a recording, but unfortunately words have the same sight shape each time they occur in the transcript. The sight shape version of a recording - the transcript - is thus a misrepresentation of the recording, and the sound shapes that it contains.

One way forward might be to find ways to help our students point to the sound shapes and say ‘Look at them - tell me why they are like that!’ and to help teachers say ‘Look at this sound shape, it is one of the many sound shapes of the word produced‘ (see here).

But we have to be careful using the verb ‘look’. Any sight shape version of a word - including phonetic versions - misrepresents the sound shape. ‘Looking’ may help, but the audio, the sound shapes have to be immediately accessible. The imperative needs to be ‘Listen!’ - or (better) ‘Look and listen!’ with the sight shapes and sound shapes either embedded in each other (as in the Flash movies you can find here), or placed side by side, as can be done in Sonocent’s AudioNotetaker (see here). There has to be immediacy of access to the different sound shapes of a word.

Although main course textbooks and contemporary listening methodology does not yet include these things, examples of what needs to become orthodoxy can be found in Hancock and McDonald’s Authentic Listening here and here, and in my own work here, here and here.

(NB Some of these links require you to play Flash Movies, which - in Safari - you may need to enable.)