ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the different requirements of second language (L2) pronunciation and L2 listening and argues that their interrelatedness – long taken for granted – should now be replaced by a productive separation in English language teaching. It provides detailed description of a classroom activity designed to familiarize students, and make them comfortable, with the messiness and unruliness of normal everyday speech. Students learn ideal sound shapes for words and the tidy rules for their combination but do not learn the wide range of sound shapes that a word can have when embedded within normal streams of speech. It is useful to think of the sound substance of speech as residing along a continuum consisting of three domains: the Greenhouse, the Garden, and the Jungle. The careful speech model consists of the citation forms of words, rules for variations in pronunciation both within and across word boundaries, and rules about prosodic shapes when they occur in sentences.