Listening to Spoken English

Gillian Brown’s first edition was a pioneering work. She showed that the implied natural development of listening competence from speaking competence was not warranted, partly because of the lack of identity between the slow formal delivery of the pronunciation drill and the wide range of pronunciation styles encountered by the foreign listener to native speakers, and partly because the emphasis on mastery of the phonological code (whether segmental sounds or tonal contours) had been at the expense of relating auditory signals to the message structure of the discourse. Of course, as language teaching over the last decade became more influenced by work in pragmatics and discourse analysis, this latter discrepancy became only more acute, and her argument in consequence the more telling.

Assessment of the performance of non-native English speaking students in the context of listening to lectures has only served to highlight the need for practice in comprehending messages amid the simplifications of informal speech. A training in listening only to how something is being said has been shown to militate against the ability in such a mode to perceive, interpret and retain what is being said.

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