10 Decoding: sounds, syllables and words
10.2 Processing phonemes
for the classroom and concrete examples of exercise types that a teacher might use.
of low-level ear-training exercises favoured by pronunciation teachers, in which learners are taught to distinguish between single-syllable minimal pairs such as pack/back, ship/sheep or leaf/leave. Clearly, perceiving the differences between phonemes is a useful first step towards producing them. But does it bring any long-term benefits in terms of listening devel-opment? Does class time allocated to discriminating between phonemes constitute time well spent, so far as the listening teacher is concerned?
We should not overstate the usefulness of ear-training of this kind, but it certainly has a part to play in a process approach to listening. It serves to practise the distinctions that experience has taught an L1 listener to make between words that are closely similar. It is even possible that a record of the confusability of certain words forms part of the L1 listener’s lexical knowledge.
There is a great deal of evidence that L2 listeners tend to analyse input in terms of word-sized units. But many of the matches they make are rough approximations that do not correspond exactly to the sounds that the listener heard. To reduce the prevalence of this kind of guesswork (which may have knock-on effects for an understanding of the recording as a whole), we need to take steps to ensure that the matches made are based on accurate perception. As the listener becomes more confident of her phoneme values, she becomes less inclined to make rash leaps in the dark at word level.
The minimal pairs tradition provides a starting point, but we need to extend it to take account of recent insights into how learners internalise phoneme values. The experience of academics training students in L1 phonetics suggests that, to fully master an unfamiliar sound, a learner needs to be able to identify it within individual words as well as between minimally different pairs. Teachers thus need to expand the range of ear-training exercise types that they use. Table 10.1 proposes several different formats, graded by difficulty, which draw upon the methods that speech scientists employ when researching L1 phoneme perception.
Lists of minimal pairs for a programme of discrimination exercises can be found in Gimson (1994) and Baker (2006). But, in designing exercises, the following considerations should be taken into account:
The words used should be relatively frequent and roughly equivalent in terms of frequency.
When practising consonants, a range of different vowels should be fea-tured; when practising vowels a range of adjacent consonants should be featured. This allows for the way in which phonemes vary according to the context in which they occur.
Table 10.2 suggests various types of phoneme discrimination exercise.
The examples that are given practise the /p–b/ contrast.
Table 10.1 Graded ear-training tasks
a. Minimal pair discrimination between spoken words (A/B).
Given a choice in writing, listener decides if she heard A or B.
Given two choices in writing, listener matches one to A and one to B.
b. Say whether what is on the page matches A or B. (A/B – X) Listener hears two spoken words A and B, then one of them is repeated.
c. Transcribe one member of a minimal pair. (A or B?) Listener hears a word that is readily confused with another.
d. Repeat spoken non-words which comply with the phonology of L2.
Table 10.2 Phoneme discrimination exercises
Contrast response (A/B): ‘Put up your left hand when you hear the sound represented by P and your right hand when you hear the sound represented by B.’
pack pack pack back – bill bill pill – bush bush push push –
pea bee pea bee bee
Matching exercise (A/B – X): ‘You will hear two words. Then you will hear one of them again. Write A if it was the first word and B if it was the second.’
back – pack back bill – pill pill bush – push push bee – pea bee
Contrast dictation: ‘On your worksheet, you will see pairs of words: BACK/PACK, BILL/PILL, BUSH/PUSH, etc. Decide which one I say’.
Transcription: ‘Write down the word you hear.’
pack bill bush pea bought
Unknown word repetition: ‘You will hear a word that you do not know. Repeat it.’
balm perk pent batch
10.2.2 Extrapolating written forms from spoken ones First language processing
As well as acquiring experience of the multiple forms a phoneme might take, a literate first language listener has also built up a set of phoneme–
grapheme correspondences. These rules link the sounds of a language to the letters and pairs of letters (sh-, th-, -ea-, -ay, etc.) that represent them in writing; they also associate sound sequences with letter sequences (/at/ to -ight, /aυnd/ to -ound, /av/ to -ive, /ʃn/ to -tion, etc.).
A knowledge of sound–spelling relationships is more important than commentators often realise. It has obvious applications when a native speaker is producing language in that it enables him to work out how to say a word of low frequency that has only ever been encountered in reading. But it also has a part to play in listening. A listener might need to record in written form something that has occurred in speech; an example might be when a note-taker has to represent unfamiliar technical terms heard in a lecture. A more everyday type of sound–spelling matching is required when one hears an unfamiliar place name and has to locate it on a map.2
Second language practice
For the second language listener, there are additional uses. Because of the primacy given to the spoken word in language teaching methodology in many parts of the world, the likelihood is that a learner will first encounter a word in its spoken form. In that case, she will need to work out how it is written, for the purposes of:
making a note of a new item of vocabulary;
‘fixing’ a mental representation of the word (written representations in the mind are much more robust than spoken ones);
looking the word up in a dictionary.
Even when not acquiring new words, L2 users have to engage quite fre-quently in sound–spelling matching. The linking of spoken words to writ-ten forms occurs frequently in academic contexts, in business meetings and in social interaction (I’ll meet you in Waterstone’s). Personal names are an especially treacherous area (This is Geraldine Frobisher, your new manager). They may have to be retrieved later, and memories stored in phonological form tend to be unreliable. The listener may feel the need to picture the name in terms of its spelling even if she does not write it down.
2 Not always easy to do with British place names.
Spelling extrapolation is an area that currently receives little attention in listening instruction. It deserves to form part of a process approach in that it is important both to learning a second language (enabling dic-tionary skills to be acquired) and to using it. Exercises should aim to create awareness of the underlying spelling system, not to teach individ-ual word forms. They should thus feature words which are as regular as possible in terms of the spelling system, and exemplify particular sound–
spelling relationships (see Kenworthy, 1987: 94–112 for examples).
Table 10.3 suggests some exercise types that an instructor might wish to use.
Table 10.3 Examples of extrapolation exercises
Transcription of unknown words. ‘Write down the words you hear. Each word will be said twice.’ Teacher dictates infrequent words.
butcher panic robbery sceptical cherub turnip simper camber bristle pristine
Dictionary practice. ‘Listen to these words; then look up their meaning in your dictionary.’
quibble pheasant stretcher limb
alight despite freight innate grain cane slovenly breath relief fraud
Vocabulary strings. ‘Look at these words, which rhyme. Write down other words that rhyme with each one. Be careful with the spelling.’ Teacher uses a homophone pair like pane/pain or a common word ending like -ight in light.
Cognates. Teacher dictates words with cognates in L1. Learners spell them using L2 spelling rules.
Non-word dictation. ‘Listen and write down these trade names.’
Teacher dictates non-words which conform to L2 phonology.
Proper name dictation. ‘Listen and write down the name of the city.’ Teacher chooses cities with regular spellings.
Cardiff – Vancouver – Nottingham – Darwin – Wellington – Madison
(cont.)
Table 10.3 (cont.)
Note-taking. ‘Listen to these answerphone messages. Write down the names of the people who left them and where they are from.’
Hello. My name’s Harper. I’m ringing from the Grove Corporation in Darwin.
Locating words on a map by approximate matching. ‘Follow the journey on a map, marking the stations that are mentioned.’
Here is a map of the London Underground / New York subway / Sydney City Circle. Let me tell you how to get to where I live. The nearest station to you is [A]. Can you find it? Now, get the northbound train as far as [B]. When you get to [B], you have to change to the [X] line and get the train going towards [C]. You get off at [D]. . .