Listening in the Real World: Clues to English Conversation

Listening in the Real World: Clues to English Conversation has been designed to bridge the gap between the formally enunciated language of the ESL classroom and the informal language that the student is likely to encounter beyond the classroom setting. By concentrating on a series of commonly spoken reductions, the tape-text attempts to make English comprehensible to the ESL student who may have formulated an inaccurate set of expectancies about the way English should sound. The thirty-six lessons of the book are intended to help the student decipher the real world English of reduced forms (assimilations, coarticulations, and glides). The tape-text gives the English language learner practice in listening to and repeating sentences as they are likely to be spoken by a native American speaker of English. The lessons are arranged in a cumulative fashion so that reductions presented in earlier lessons are incorporated in later lessons.