Hello everyone,
In today's post I am going to address one of the topics that worries many learners: listening. And understandably so, because although it requires no effort in producing your own "material", it requires a number of skills that most learners don't possess, specially in officially monolingual communities.
When we discuss listening we often link it to speaking. They are both sides of the same coin, in the same way as writing and reading follow a similar pattern. To continue with this comparison, what writing and speaking have in common is an interpretation code: writing conventions (from spelling and punctuation, to the conventions for the different kinds of texts).
In the case of speaking and listening, that code is pronunciation, an area that until recently has been neglected nearly completely in the teaching of languages, for a number of reasons.
In countries like Spain, the main reason is that native speakers perceive a strong correspondence between sounds and spelling, and discrepancies are only minor and training in phonetics is considered neglectable. (That could be an object for debate...)
In the case of languages like English, the discrepancies between spelling and speaking make it very useful to know something, however basic, about phonetics in general and the phonetics of English in general. Learners are bewildered about the apparently unsystematic pronunciation of words in English.
Before going into more detail about the hurdles that a learner of English finds in understanding spoken English, I would like to list here some of the reasons for the present confusing state of the language.
1) The origin of words: words in English come from a number of different languages. Among them and "in order of appearance": Celtic and pre-roman languages, Latin and greek, Old danish, French and finally virtually any other language in the world that came in contact with "Imperial Britain." Oh, and I was forgetting of course the celtic languages spoken in Ireland and Scotland.
2) It is important to notice that no "Royal academy" or equally almighty, undisputed authority, has been able to set a rigid standard and as a result, English is "in flux" on a permanent basis.
3) Some languages which made an influence on English did so at different times in history. For example French reached its highest influence with the Norman conquest (yes, there was a french king in Britain!) and many words entered the language at that time. Other words from French entered English in later centuries.
When words were absorbed into the language, the criteria applied were different at different points in history, which explains why words which are obviously of French origin don't always follow the same phonetic adaptation rules. The same applies for...
4) ...Latin and Greek. Not only are words from Latin and greek inconsistently adapted to the "english mouth" but words which were and even words that weren't originally greek or latin, had their spellings corrected and returned to their original greek or latin spelling, while keeping the English pronunciation.
5) The printing press was a blessing - and a curse. It was a blessing as a means to preserve knowledge that had miraculously been transmitted through handmade copies. However it was a curse because it was in the hands of printers. And printers were - and are - businessmen. Printers earned their money based on the number of characters they printed. So, over a period of English history, when the public were not aware enough of spelling conventions, printers took advantage of that by adding extra letters to many words. Unluckily, people started to follow those new spellings, notoriously adding a final "-e" to many words which is not pronounced.
And there are probably more things that could be said, but my intention was to give you an idea why things are they way they are. So what do we do now? How can we sail through this sea of contradictions? In principle in the same way native speakers do. But in a systematic way.
Our system will be a checklist to troubleshoot your problems, which will allow you to identify the reasons why you have problems much better than a "one size fits all" category such as "this doesn't make sense so I give up".
Here is my list:
1) If you are not familiar with the topic at all (not even in your own language), you will never understand things. Listening in every language is all about anticipating as much as you can and gleaning the rest from the context.
2) You may know about the topic - but not in English. Solution: read in English about it. Ideally read and listen. Audiobooks such as the Oxford bookworms factfiles are the best choice, since they deal with interesting topics (which might appeal to you more than, let's say, "Ann of the Green Gables").
Using materials which combine reading and listening going in parallel are excellent to kill two birds at the same time: improving your knowledge of a topic in English and linking spelling and pronunciation.
3) You know about the topic in English already, but you still find it difficult to understand words or sentences about it. This could be because:
4) Your listening expectations are misguided: usually if your pronunciation differs noticeably from what you will eventually hear, the natural tendency is to expect something similar to what you can produce. For example if you are not aware of the fact that many words in English are written and pronounced with initial liquid "s" and this does not happen in your language (e.g. in Spanish) you will keep saying "Espain" and what is worse, you will expect to hear it from other speakers. And that is not going to happen.
5) So if my pronunciation and the expectations I base on it are misguided. What can I do about it? The next step is to analyze the reasons for your pronunciation/word/sentence perception. Here are some:
a) sounds or combinations of sounds which are alien to you (e.g. liquid "s" for Spanish speakers).
b) sounds are all familiar but they appear in a strange position (final "g" in English words tends to be pronounced as /x/ (as in Loch) because the plosive /g/ sound does not happen in Spanish, but /x/ does.
c) distinctions that do not occur in your language. For example the short/long vowel distinction in English, which carries meaning differences in English but is not exploited by Spanish.
d) radically different intonation/emphasis patterns. English uses intonation for emphasis and in turn emphasis for pointing out the difference between new information and old information. In practice this means that you emphasize new information (what you have to add) and tiptoe through any references to what has been said.
e) Specially puzzling for Spanish speakers (and I suppose for many others) is the existence of words which have two clearly different pronunciations: emphasized ("stressed") and normal ("unstressed). This specially important because the most common words in English are those which do not carry lexical meaning, but actually structure the sentences: articles, prepositions, determiners, auxiliaries... If we are not aware that these words are unstressed most of the time, we will feel puzzled about them every time we hear them. And this is what creates the typical snowball effect in listening exercises (and tests!).
6) Not everything is on the learners' plates: The common pitfall in EFL teaching in Spain (and probably elsewhere) has always been that when you - as a native speaker - pronounce those words without a context, you pronounce the "emphasized" version. This is a problem because speakers learn to expect a form which is not the rule, but actually the exception.
So to sum up, listening and speaking are like "horse and carriage" and the link between them (the code so to speak) is the set of pronunciation rules and conventions. Lack of awareness of these rules and conventions will negatively affect speaking (for obvious reasons) but it will also impair the ability to predict and/or identify words and even sentences in advance, which is what we all naturally do in al languages.
But the most important thing is the most evident. An analysis of the reasons why we are not successful at listening will give us the solutions. Eventually it all boils down to dipping head first and embracing a different system naturally. And that is not a linguistic problem... that's psychology! Otherwise the solution to any of the problems above is practice, of course, but practice will take you nowhere if you don't know what you are aiming at.
