Interview by Shannon McCrocklin, Southern Illinois University, Illinois, USA

Could you describe your area of research/teaching interest?

Yes, the area that I’ve been most interested in my whole career is listening. If we think about the integrated skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, the research tells us that students feel listening is the area that they have the least control over and teachers feel they are the least prepared to teach. Currently, teachers seem to teach listening following similar guidelines they use for reading— make sure students can understand the main ideas, then details— but those guidelines are for decoding orthographic input. So, we have been working with a refugee center here in Boston, and we discovered that when working with students from Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) populations, you cannot give pre-literate students reading material and ask them to read and answer the comprehension questions. Yet there seems to be no comparable realization that “teaching” listening requires more than having students listen to aural material and answer comprehension questions. The learners admit that they can’t understand words that they know when they hear them in connected speech, or they catch the words, but can’t figure out the actual point or meaning. And this happens all of the time. To address this, we must first teach students how to process listening input for both message content and speaker intent. So that’s my area of interest.

What initially got you interested in this area of TESOL?

When I first started teaching in the 1970s, one of the first cohorts of students I had was from Venezuela. These students were very articulate and fluent, and they were fairly accurate. They insisted, though, that they couldn’t understand me or people they met, and I found it hard to imagine that these students with so much speaking skill could insist that they couldn’t understand. But they pushed us to create a listening course and we started the course by giving dictations. We realized that students were missing or mishearing information because they were misinterpreting connected speech. The dictation practice was humbling and revealing. I became convinced there was a problem, and we needed to look into what to do about it.

Could you tell me about your most recent research work?

One of my doctoral fellows and I just finished a three-year, eye-tracking study to look at how learners process in real-time, orthographic as well as aural input. We were interested in prosody specifically. What we discovered was that for native speakers, eye gaze duration was shorter and there was less recursion of contrasted elements, but their pitch range utilized intonational stress to create the contrast in their speech, whereas non-native speakers spent more time looking at an item that was contrastively marked (as measured by the heat maps and more recursion), but then failed to use intonation to make the contrast in their own speech, suggesting a higher cognitive load in processing meaning-associated stressed constituents. We presented this in Tokyo at the New Sounds conference in August.

I actually know you through your work in pronunciation and obviously there is a lot of intersection between listening and pronunciation. I want to ask you about your pronunciation teaching background, but please tie in listening where you see connections. What do you consider to be the major trends in pronunciation and listening teaching?

I’m glad you asked about the listening/speaking connection, and then I will talk about trends. I actually hold somewhat of an outlier position regarding the relationship between listening and speaking. A lot of research seeks to establish an order of pedagogy; should we work on listening first to improve pronunciation? I was encouraged by previous work (Linebaugh & Roche, Casserly & Pisoni) to look at whether we can go the opposite direction, helping students’ speech production closely approximate the target until they can hear it when produced by others. Often teachers correct a pronunciation issue through repeat-after-me activities, but students — especially those who insist they are repeating — might not be hearing what is important or different in the input they are receiving. Students sometimes need metalinguistic knowledge to begin to understand what they are missing. And perhaps getting students to produce the target sound(s) is a gateway to getting the student to hear or notice what they were missing from the input. You attack speech perception through speech production.

And then you asked about trends, so here I see the biggest movements or trends of the last quarter century to be focusing on suprasegmentals instead of segmentals, thanks to the work of scholars like Joan Morley, Judy Gilbert, Linda Grant, Laura Hahn, and others and focusing on intelligibility instead of nativeness, thanks to the work of scholars like Tracey Derwing, Murray Munro, John Levis, Ron Thomson, and others.

I’d also like to mention a possible future focus on complexity theory. I’m going to mention the work of a former doctoral student, Di Liu, who is now at Temple University. He has an article coming out in the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation that explores prosody transfer through the lens of complexity theory. Di focused on the ways that Mandarin Chinese uses intonation similarly to English to show discourse structure and contrasts, but that skill with intonation is not transferred to English L2 speech. What my student found was that he was able to draw study participants’ attention to the importance of intonation in English by removing important intonation contours from a Mandarin speech sample. This helped the participants notice and understand the impact of intonation. Notably then, one participant, an ITA at a local university who began incorporating into L2 English the same prosodic features used in L1 Mandarin for the same functions, received compliments from co-workers that suddenly he was more intelligible, so this one feature made a huge difference to this speaker’s intelligibility. Thus, taking intonation as an example, approaching pronunciation instruction with a focus on the interaction of multiple features, such as pitch, duration, and intensity, moves us away from isolated pattern practice and toward the complex interplay of information structure and pragmatic functions used to convey speaker intent.

What do you think makes an effective pronunciation or listening teacher?

The biggest thing that we tell our prospective teachers is that their learning shouldn’t end when they have their degree in hand. Join an organization, join TESOL and/or its local affiliate, and participate in the annual convention. Stay informed by reading articles and publications. That will keep you abreast of the trends and what is happening. Researchers today are trying to make their work much more approachable to teachers, so they need to take the time to read it. In our field, we now have a dedicated serial publication, the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation (John Levis, founding editor) and a conference, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching (created and organized by John Levis), which publishes its freely available electronic proceedings.

What general advice would you give to those starting out in the area of pronunciation and listening teaching?

I think there are three big steps in getting started. First, use surveys to find out students’ beliefs about learning. Then, find out what strategies learners are already using in their learning. Finally, we need to test learners’ skills. You can use a very short recording, make a cloze task with function words missing, and find out how much learners are able to catch. Another way to tell what students know is in the pre-listening step in which you prepare students to listen by asking students to predict and guess words that they will hear. The step that is often missing is asking students what they think those words will sound like. Finally, when it comes to teaching prosody, you need to find out if students can detect an increase in pitch, locate it, and interpret what meaning it contributes so three steps in both cases.

Would you describe one of your favorite activities to teach pronunciation and/or listening and describe why it is a favorite?

So, I do much more teacher education these days, but I use an activity in a Legal English class I’ve been honored to be invited to co-teach. Having first surveyed students’ beliefs (e.g., Native speakers speak too fast; if they spoke slower, I could understand them. [Strongly] Agree – [Strongly] Disagree) and ascertained their listening strategies (e.g., I pay attention to the content words; the little words aren’t important [Strongly] Agree – [Strongly] Disagree), we provide a CSPAN listening sample. Students listen to a Supreme Court justice addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee, and we do the steps I talked about. We provide the topic, elicit, and preview the vocabulary expected to be heard, focusing on what it will sound like, and only then do students listen. We end by debriefing what worked and what didn’t. Our discoveries: students familiar with only dictionary citation form may not recognize known words due to connected speech processes and/or a mismatch when their acoustic images don’t match the lexical stress patterns of multi-syllabic words.

What do you think the future holds for pronunciation and listening teaching?

I think that the interest in listening is growing and maybe that is the trend I have noticed the most. I am working on a book with Tamara Jones for practitioners on listening in the classroom. John Levis and I are working on a prospectus for a book more targeted towards scholarly work on listening. I think the trend really is listening, realizing this is the area where learners feel least secure and teachers don’t feel they have the training to know how to approach it. But the number of papers and conference talks on listening is increasing, and that is a current area of focus.

Find the entire recorded interview, with more content and helpful examples, here.

References:

Casserly, E. D., & Pisoni, D. B. (2010). Speech perception and production. Wiley Interdisciplinary Review of Cognitive Science, 1(5), 629-647. https://doi:10.1002/wcs.63

Linebaugh, G., & Roche, T. (2015). Evidence that L2 production training can enhance perception. Journal of Academic Language & Learning, 9(1), A1-A17. https://doi:10.1177/0267658311423455

Marnie Reed is Professor of Education and affiliated faculty in the Linguistics Program at Boston University, and director of the graduate TESOL program. She teaches courses in linguistics, second language acquisition, and applied phonology. She is co-author (with John Levis) of the Wiley Handbook of English Pronunciation.