Richard Cauldwell's long-awaited Phonology for listening: Teaching the stream of speech, the fruit of decades of work from a pioneer, promotes the use of spontaneous speech recordings in language teaching and learning. It is available in print and electronic form, and is accompanied by sound files available at www.speechinaction.com. The graphic features of the book make for easy reading and the pages do not look crowded. The initial ‘Symbols and notation’ pages make it clear how italics, bold and capital letters will be used to indicate stress, syllable and speech unit boundaries. Tones and key are represented by a system of arrows which will be familiar to readers of Brazil (Reference Brazil1994) and Bradford (Reference Bradford1988). Symbols for the vowels and consonants of what Cauldwell refers to as British English (BrE) are the same as those used by most British publishers, although American symbols are used where necessary (p. 160). There are a few software screenshots and plentiful extracts, often followed by tables which are particularly helpful in highlighting their key features.

The book builds on the author's previous work, especially the award-winning Streaming speech (Cauldwell Reference Cauldwell2004), as well as on the work of Bradford (Reference Bradford1988), Brown (Reference Brown1990), Hewings (Reference Hewings1993), Brazil (Reference Brazil1994), and others. The target audience is ELT teachers worldwide, whether experienced or at the beginning of their careers. Cauldwell's deceptively simple yet ambitious aim is to modernise the teaching of listening by modifying the way spontaneous speech samples are used in the classroom.

His main argument is that teachers should focus more on perception and decoding, whereas ‘current listening methodology omits direct engagement with the sound substance. Instead it is dominated by testing, listening comprehension practice, training in compensatory strategies and a reliance on the fact (or hope) that osmosis will work in the long term’ (p. 256). To this end, he convincingly pleads for a distinction to be made between a ‘clear speech’ model for pronunciation work and a new, different model for listening work that focuses on what he variously terms the ‘blurry’, ‘wilder’, ‘messy’ or ‘unruly’ bits of normal, connected speech. After encouraging teachers, in Cauldwell (Reference Cauldwell2003), to ‘grasp the nettle’ of perception work, in this book the author suggests five new metaphors to raise awareness of this distinction and to ‘add to the rather limited vocabulary that exists to describe activities in which our students interact with the sound substance of speech’ (p. 261): the greenhouse, the garden, the jungle,Footnote ¹ savouring and handling. The last two are defined in the extensive glossary at the end of the book.

The book's twenty chapters are organized into four parts, with the first providing ‘an easy-to-learn framework’ that is used in the following parts to ‘illuminate the stream of speech’ (p. 2). A bibliography and Answer Key are provided after each of the four parts and all chapters include a Further Reading section. For time-starved readers, a Summary and What's Next section highlights the key points of all except the Introduction and the last chapter. For teachers interested in practical applications, each chapter in the first three parts ends with Language Awareness Activities and in Part 4, ‘Teaching listening’, sixty pages are devoted entirely to exploring such hands-on applications. Unfortunately, there is no index.

Part 1, ‘The window on speech framework’, introduces new terms, such as soundshape, blur gap and squeeze zone. One of Cauldwell's stated goals is to help learners avoid what he calls Ying's dilemma, which is defined as ‘those moments in speech when words are squeezed into unfamiliar soundshapes’ (p. 3) and where Ying ‘cannot catch the words she knows’ (p. 3). To make it easier for teachers to pinpoint such moments where listeners are likely to have trouble, the first two chapters present the author's way of ‘representing, in writing, the rhythmic and intonation features of speech’ (p. 13). Readers are then given a choice: either work through the next three chapters, which provide more extensive training with the window on speech, or skip them and go directly to Parts 2, 3 and 4.

In Part 2, ‘Describing spontaneous speech’, Cauldwell applies the window on speech to describe the sound substance of the spontaneous speech stream. Chapter 6 is devoted to ‘drafting phenomena’, as in reviewing and re-writing, and emphasizes that filled pauses, restarts, repetitions and reformulations (frequently called disfluencies) are normal and must be included in a pedagogical model of spontaneous speech. Chapter 7 looks at the speed of speech, and the next two chapters explore soundshapes (of both function and content words). Chapter 10 shows ‘that English speech rhythms are fleeting and ever-changing and that the absence of a persistent rhythm aids communication’ (p. 131). The author also provides an extremely clear explanation of the difference between (stress- or syllable-)timing theory and timing activities. ‘Stress-timing theory is (or should be) dead. . . . Stress-timing activities in the classroom, on the other hand, are very much alive and very useful’ (p. 142). Appendix 1 is referred to at the end of this part because it summarizes the main differences between careful speech and spontaneous speech.

Part 3, ‘Accents, identity and emotion in speech’, examines ‘the colours and flavours of the sound substance which come from accents and emotions’ (p. 157). This part is another example of the originality of Cauldwell's approach. Obviously any book purporting to deal with speaking in or listening to English must deal with the tremendous variety of Englishes; this is why, as explained in the Introduction, Cauldwell uses the terms L1 and L2, instead of native and non-native speaker (p. 7). Not only do the recordings for Part 3 provide excellent examples of variety, the L2 accents in Chapter 14 are also analysed from three perspectives: from Cauldwell's window on speech perspective, from the more common accent-reduction perspective, and from an English as lingua franca perspective. This three-phase analysis reveals that when subjected to an ELF-practitioner's perspective, where the goal is international intelligibility, native speakers can be seen as making errors. For me, as an L1 speaker of English, turning the tables in this way definitively convinced me of the need to use different models for listening work and for pronunciation work with my learners. Consequently, this book on listening promotes a shift in attitudes to L2 accents that is similar to the shift called for in ELF publications for speaking.

As a logical follow-up, Part 4, ‘Teaching listening’, demonstrates how teachers can ‘help students grasp a substance which is inherently ungraspable’ (p. 257) and Cauldwell cites Buck's (1995) suggestions for how to do this: sensitize students to the problem, consciously discuss it, explain how pronunciation changes, give examples. In Chapter 19, he also describes soft focus listening as involving ‘turning off the process of understanding’, in order to more effectively work with ‘extracts where the recording is closer to the unruliness of spontaneous speech, rather than the careful speech model’ (p. 285). By this stage of the book, this ‘letting go of the careful speech model’ (p. 266) sounds quite rational but in the classroom it can provoke resistance. For example, one very advanced group on which I tried certain parts of the book insisted that most learners would prefer simplistic, categorical explanations to such messiness. Cauldwell addresses such perceptions in Chapter 17, arguing that for too long ‘materials writers have been too considerate of learners’ sensitivities’ and that instead of focusing on what learners can cope with, we should ‘teach them to become comfortable with the realities of spontaneous speech’ (p. 266). Teachers need ‘to support them through this temporary discomfort and frustration, to ensure that they do not blame themselves for the fact that they cannot decode immediately’ (p. 267).

To conclude, Cauldwell's two models and five metaphors are powerful explanatory devices. However, some ELT teachers may not have had enough experience and/or adequate training in phonetics and phonology to see the value of separating a careful speech model (for pronunciation work) from a spontaneous speech model (for listening work). For them, this book may represent a leap of faith, a jump I highly encourage them to make, as the author clearly shows both why and how to transform samples of spontaneous, everyday speech into more effective learning resources. When Richard Cauldwell says that we need to train students to ‘handle the transient- to “get their fingers dirty”’ (p. 257), perhaps it is teachers who need to start by adjusting their own mindset. This book, from an author who seems genuinely interested in learners’ needs and perspectives, will inspire ELT professionals to revisit their understanding of the speech stream in order to harness its potential more effectively. Such a change of focus has the potential to help many learners to better cope with real spoken English.