During a recent office hours visit, a Japanese student shared the frustration he felt attending a legal conference and finding out he could hardly understand a panelist with a British accent. A few weeks later, a Korean student came to an appointment with pen and paper in hand, ready to take notes on how he could improve his listening skills beyond just ‘listening more’ as I had mentioned in class. I have been teaching second language (L2) listening and speaking in higher education for six years, and these two students stopped me in my tracks. I could easily advise them on improving the perception of difficult L2 sounds. I could also recommend a dozen engaging podcasts that would expose them to a variety of English dialects and help them increase the number of hours per day they spent in the target language. But at the discourse level, to help with difficulties they faced in authentic listening environments, I had no useful advice. Even after hours of searching academic journals, I still felt dissatisfied that the only response I could tell these students was, ‘Just listen more; you’ll get better’.
A typical classroom activity that focuses on the listening mode will likely begin with an audio recording of clear and possibly scripted speech, followed by questions designed to check comprehension (e.g. Mendelsohn Reference Mendelsohn2001). Perhaps the instructor does a deeper dive and teaches metacognitive strategies: prelistening vocabulary activation, predicting, monitoring comprehension, and using context clues (e.g. Hasan Reference Hasan2000). Yet, listening practice and strategy instruction alone only help learners to cope with the fast, messy, and often times irregular nature of authentic speech. These lessons do not actually teach learners how to listen (Vandergrift Reference Vandergrift2004).
Richard Cauldwell’s second book offers a welcome alternative to conventional L2 listening instruction by focusing on decoding. The author believes that the overarching goal of listening instruction should be to ‘make learners familiar and comfortable with the unruliness of everyday spontaneous speech’ (p. 6). The intended audience is ‘teachers, teacher trainers, textbook authors, and course book authors’ (p. 1), and I would add students and scholars to this list as well. Prior knowledge of phonetics and phonology is useful, but not necessary. The book focuses on British and American English dialects, although its main principles can be applied to any foreign or second language instructional setting. The content is neatly divided into four sections. Parts one and two lay the foundation for a syllabus dedicated to decoding. These chapters explain what decoding is and justify its need. Part three describes common phonological processes that occur in British and American English surface forms, and part four presents numerous classroom tools and activities. The following summarizes the four parts that comprise this book.
Part one consists of ten chapters in which the author outlines ten fundamental principles that motivate his approach to L2 listening instruction. I will describe four substantial principles here. First, Cauldwell believes it is important to note the difference between reading a text and decoding speech. Written text is stable and constant; it can be read, reviewed, and referenced in an iterative process. On the other hand, speech is unruly, unreliable, and fleeting. Thus, approaches to teaching written and oral texts must necessarily be different.
Next, Cauldwell introduces an insightful ‘botanic metaphor’ that he references throughout the book (p. 7). He directs the reader to imagine speech in three forms: as a greenhouse, a garden, and a jungle. The most careful, ideal version of a spoken word is like a plant in a greenhouse. In this tidy, controlled environment, all plants are potted in separate containers and placed in neat rows. There are no weeds or pests. A second version of speech is the garden form, one that recognizes the occurrence of rule-defined phonological alternations in connected speech. In the garden, flowers, bushes, and grass touch one another, intermingling at their borders, yet still maintaining a pleasing and manicured look. Finally, the jungle represents authentic and spontaneous speech. An observer cannot see where one plant begins and another ends. It is wild and unmanaged. The reality of a language classroom is that instructors offer students the greenhouse or garden forms of speech, but learners encounter the jungle form in the real world. In quotidian interactions, learners hear dozens of acoustic realizations of words and phrases that do not follow their ideal or rule-defined versions. Rather than ignoring the jungle forms, instructors should focus attention on them.
A third principle attends to the difference between understanding and decoding. Once a listener, native or non-native, can skillfully extract meaning from the sound substance (i.e. understand), they become expert listeners. Expert listeners hear a message and discard the actual phonetic information. For the most part, they have no need to stop and carefully decode the sound substance, so they are largely unaware of the realities or ambiguities of the jungle forms of speech. Likewise, if learners are given a transcript, they become expert listeners and no longer have any trouble discerning the intended speech. (This is also a cautionary warning against giving learners transcripts during a decoding lesson.) For instance, the phrase ‘and then’ can sound like ‘annen’ in spontaneous, contextualized speech. Expert listeners believe they hear a ‘th’ sound but it may not even exist in the acoustic information. This phenomenon is called the perceptual restoration (or phonemic restoration) of a missing phoneme and has been studied in both native and non-native speaker populations (e.g. Ishida & Arai Reference Ishida and Arai2016, Leonard et al. Reference Leonard, Baud, Sjerps and Chang2016). The distance between what expert listeners presume they hear and the actual sound substance is called the blur gap. Teachers must overcome the blur gap in order to hear the raw sound substance again, which is ‘indeterminate and capable of being heard in different ways’ (p. 41). Only at this moment will alternative ‘reasonable hearings’ be unlocked, and the instructor can plan lessons that help students overcome acoustic hurdles that hinder comprehension (p. 41).
The final principle that I will note in this summary is Cauldwell’s suggested unit for perceptual analysis. Although single words and individual sounds seem like an intuitive place to start, the author advocates for word chunks to be analyzed and studied. Expert listeners need very little acoustic information to understand a high frequency chunk. Thus, these phrases’ acoustic realizations are extremely minimal, reduced, or altered. Additionally, the context in which a sound or word is said can crush them into varying realities. Listeners need practice with these forms, as even the most advanced learners misunderstand function words that appear in these chunks (p. 96).
Part two of the book explores three important topics, beginning with teacher training in Chapter 11. Common pedagogical approaches to L2 listening instruction are a result of long-standing traditions, shared activities between colleagues, directives from authority figures, and native speaker intuitions. Unfortunately, many of these lessons are riddled with well-intentioned ‘virtuous obstacles’ (p. 51). For example, a common listening lesson asks students to focus on stressed and emphasized words in order to glean information from a stream of speech. But many high frequency function words that carry a significant portion of meaning, such as ‘not’, are often not stressed in spontaneous speech at all. Think of the contraction ‘didn’t’ as in ‘I didn’t do that’. The contraction can simply sound like ‘din’, effectively reducing the three phonemes of ‘not’ to a single nasal segment. Students can learn and practice rules like listening for stress, yet rules are ‘both breakable and often broken’ (p. 45). A second obstacle that may hinder instruction is prioritizing a happy classroom, full of smiling students. An instructor feels good when students enjoy a lesson. On the other hand, when students struggle with material and have furrowed eyebrows, teachers may feel like their lessons are failing. But struggling can be a sign that the instructor has found the right material to cover. Both students and teachers need to ‘expand their comfort zones’ in order to grapple with difficult content that needs decoding practice (p. 81).
Next, in Chapter 12, the author introduces two models of speech: the Careful Speech Model (CSM) and the Spontaneous Speech Model (SSM). The CSM is prescriptivist, which assumes there are ideal intelligible speech forms. This model is referenced in English as a second language (ESL) textbooks and dominates in classrooms. Quite the opposite, the SSM is descriptivist and acknowledges the unruly nature of spontaneous speech. From the SSM perspective, decoding lessons are critical.
In the final chapter of this section, Cauldwell describes existing approaches to listening instruction. Traditional ESL classrooms tend to focus on the level of meaning during listening practice, and decoding is often allocated to the end of the lesson, if at all. For example, metacognitive strategy instruction developed by Vandergrift & Goh (Reference Vandergrift and Goh2012) covers the stages of listening: inferencing, planning, monitoring, and evaluating. With this model, decoding appears in the post-listening phase, after all meaning-focused instruction is complete. However, Cauldwell believes that decoding practice can happen at any stage of a listening lesson. In fact, it can be the entire focus of a lesson on its own, as the ‘sound substance is a code that needs to be taught’ (p. 80).
Part three, comprising Chapters 16–18, contain lists of high frequency word clusters that undergo a variety of sound transformations in spontaneous speech. Cauldwell explains each transformation, reduction, or deletion in great detail, which is valuable information for readers who are not trained in phonetics or phonology.
Chapter 16 presents eighteen high frequency clusters, such as ‘do you know what I mean’, ‘a lot of’, and ‘one of the’. Many of these phrases appear on Carter & McCarthy’s (Reference Carter and McCarthy2006) list of high frequency collocations. The author explains how the sounds of these phrases transform and reduce; one specific example involves the first two words of the phrase ‘do you know what I mean’ which can undergo a reduction to sound like ‘ji’ or ‘ju’. Many of the phrases in this chapter are represented in audio files, available for free on the Speech in Action website (www.speechinaction.org). Beyond the phrases and sound transformations, Cauldwell also presents a method of measuring the speed of speech. A typical talking speed is approximately is four to five syllables per second (e.g. Tauroza & Allison Reference Tauroza and Allison1990, Bradlow, Toretta & Pisoni Reference Bradlow, Torretta and Pisoni1996), but in high frequency cluster areas, speakers can increase their speed to an incredible eleven syllables per second. This quantitative measure shows how common phrases can truly be crushed into a small space.
Chapter 17 begins with a disclaimer that the descriptions within are ‘practical [and] not theoretical’ meaning the ultimate purpose is to describe what happens in real world speech, rather than to provide a ‘coherent phonetic or phonological theory’ (p. 109). The processes mentioned thereafter, mainly consonant reductions and deletions, are generalizable to a wide range of phonetic contexts and are important to know for successful decoding. Cauldwell refers to reductions as ‘blurs’ and deletions as ‘drops’. Thus, a word-final ‘k’ deletion is called a ‘k-drop’. One example of k-drop is presented in an audio clip of a store clerk saying, ‘Would you like a receipt with that?’ The ‘k’ sound at the end of ‘like’ is entirely deleted. The chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, and a notation that these authors do not use the same terminology that he utilizes in the chapter.
Chapter 18 generally focuses attention on processes that occur at the syllable- and word-level. Cauldwell uses classroom-friendly terminology, such as ‘syll-drops’, ‘DRY’, ‘smoothies’, and ‘teenies’, to describe reductions, deletions, and ambiguities (Zsiga Reference Zsiga2013). The term syll-drop represents a deletion of a whole syllable. A related phenomenon is DRY, which stands for ‘Don’t repeat yourself’. In these moments, ‘one syllable [does] the work of two’ (p. 132). Cauldwell offers the example and accompanying audio clip of a speaker saying ‘for my application’ in which ‘my’ and ‘application’ undergo a change to sound more like ‘mapplication’.
The final section of the book, part four, offers teachers ways to integrate decoding lessons into already existing course content or to create dedicated lessons to practicing decoding skills. A listening lesson or course should begin by managing students’ expectations. Students should know that if they are having difficulty with understanding fast, natural speech, it is not their fault. It is neither the fault of the listener nor the speaker, but rather an indicator that educators need to focus class time on this aspect of language use. Furthermore, it will be the task of the class to work through and grapple with authentic, messy speech. Students and instructors should both remember that discomfort is an opportunity for learning.
Chapters 20–24 contain practical information to create decoding lessons. First, Cauldwell introduces three tools – the botanic walk, the word crusher, and the accelerator – to help students break apart the speech stream and better understand how sounds transform. In the botanic walk, students are presented with the three forms of a single word or phrase, in the greenhouse, garden, and jungle representations. The word crusher is a visualization tool similar to a graphic organizer that helps students to parse syllables according to rhythm and stress in order to convert a greenhouse phrase into its jungle form. Finally, the accelerator encourages students to embody the fast pace of authentic speech by using gestures, tapping, or pronouncing the phrases at increasing speeds. Students can experience the fast pace of speech in a physical way, which may help them to hear the phrases better as well. In Chapter 21, Cauldwell offers advice for selecting audio recordings and how to use them in class. He additionally provides a dozen pencil and paper activities that offer students practice with decoding. Finally, three valuable internet-based resources are suggested for use in the classroom: YouGlish, TubeQuizard, and Ted Corpus Search Engine.
Overall, I highly recommend this book for pre- and in-service teachers and academics. The perspective Cauldwell offers is fresh and very much needed. I believe it will motivate and energize teachers to create new lessons, and students will feel like they are gaining access to authentic speech that they could not unlock before. On a personal level, I was inspired to create an eight-week listening skills workshop, dedicated entirely to decoding. My current students love the class and come back every week excited to learn more. I would love to see this text created for other languages, and I encourage teachers and scholars working in non-English settings to assemble lists of sound transformations and alternations that would be valuable for decoding practice in their target languages. In fact, Cauldwell’s recommended website, YouGlish, has recently expanded to include French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
I also believe it is imperative for researchers to explore this text and investigate its claims. At the moment, Cauldwell provides no evidence that his decoding lessons generalize to new listening contexts, increase comprehension rates, or ease the cognitive load of L2 listening. This is not necessarily a fault of the text, as the author’s intention is to reimagine classroom lessons. However, academic readers may naturally want to see the claims thoroughly researched. The majority of the textbook seems to promote the integration of top–down and bottom–up processing, through knowledge of high frequency chunks and the ability to interpret the actual acoustic signal, respectively. Top–down and bottom–up aural processing is a robust domain of research, and I recommend academics explore this line of literature for further reading (e.g. Tsui & Fullilove Reference Tsui and Fullilove1998, Mendelsohn Reference Mendelsohn2001, Field Reference Field2004). Future laboratory and classroom-based research will help both scholars and educators truly understand the efficacy of Cauldwell’s decoding approach. Teaching and research are connected in a cyclical relationship: teaching should inform research and research should inform teaching (e.g. Erlam Reference Erlam2008, Nassaji Reference Nassaji2012). This text is a fantastic addition to the L2 listening pedagogy literature, but its claims should be substantiated through research.
Although I highly recommend this book, I do believe it has some shortcomings. The text is at times repetitive, and the formatting of chapters, sections, and subsections is not ideal. Contrary to the book’s title, the content does not actually lay out a coherent and thorough plan for a listening syllabus (e.g. Breen Reference Breen, Carter and Nunan2001, Robinson Reference Robinson, Michael and Catherine2009, Baralt, Gilabert & Robinson Reference Baralt, Gilabert and Robinson2014). Beyond individual lesson ideas, there is no clear journey or goal for a curriculum to achieve. Related to this issue, the book seems to end abruptly without any big picture advice. Finally, the classroom-friendly terminology (e.g. smoothie, teenie, syll-drop, k-drop) and the inappropriate use of the term ‘model’ (i.e. Careful Speech Model and Spontaneous Speech Model) are inconsistent with existing literature (Zsiga Reference Zsiga2013, VanPatten & Williams Reference VanPatten and Williams2015) and possibly unsuitable for most classroom audiences. Nevertheless, I believe this text has tremendous value, and I recommend it without hesitation.
