English challenges

English language challenges

Pupils usually say they find listening the most difficult of the four skills. They often complain that 'English people speak too fast!' In informal spoken English people tend to speak in short bursts of words which are divided into tone units.

Words blur at their boundaries or within the word itself. For example 'corned beef' becomes 'corm beef' or 'that game' becomes 'thak game' and 'ten per cent' becomes 'tem per cent'.

In informal spoken English people tend to speak in short bursts of words which are divided into tone units. These equate approximately to grammatical chunks. Speakers emphasise those words in a tone unit which carry the most meaning in order to get their message across. They make these words prominent by saying them louder, and/or making them longer and by changing the pitch, or tune. This helps the listener know which words to concentrate on. The problem for students is that the other words in a tone unit are not stressed and are therefore more difficult to hear. Yet these unstressed words often contain important lexical and grammatical information.

In informal speech the grammatical, or function, words between the stressed lexical, or content, words tend to be unstressed and can occur in various different weak forms. This makes it difficult for students to recognise even very frequent function words such as 'a','the', 'can' and 'was' in a stream of speech.

Many scientist researches have shown that a large proportion of the English spoken in informal situations is made up of formulaic chunks of language, e.g. 'It's turned out nice again,' when talking about the weather, or 'You must have been *', when empathising with someone. Because these chunks of language are used so often, speakers articulate them less clearly than they would if they were using their own words. Again this makes it difficult for students to hear the actual words uttered.

These equate approximately to grammatical chunks. Speakers emphasise those words in a tone unit which carry the most meaning in order to get their message across. They make these words prominent by saying them louder, and/or making them longer and by changing the pitch, or tune. This helps the listener know which words to concentrate on.

The problem for students is that the other words in a tone unit are not stressed and are therefore more difficult to hear. These special features of spoken English make it difficult for students to segment, i.e. to separate a stream of speech into the individual words uttered by the speaker. Often students fail to recognise even those words which are part of their active vocabulary when listening to informal spoken English.