Gillian Brown’s views II

Image from here

In the previous blog (6th September) I wondered whether we should keep separate the teaching of pronunciation and listening. I was considering the implications of Gillian Brown’s statements about the ‘obscure acoustic blur’ of speech.

Here are two further quotations from her ‘Listening to Spoken English’ which seem to settle the question:

We are putting under a magnifying glass some aspect of speech whose whole raisin d’être is that it should not be consciously perceived. We are attempting to seize and examine a form which depends for its existence on the fact that it is obscure. (p. 58)

And crucially, this quote:

I think it cannot be too strongly urged that students should not be required to produce the forms we examine here, only to recognise them and understand utterances in which they occur. (p. 60)

Perhaps therefore we need separate models of speech for pronunciation and listening.