Slowed-down speech - the root of listening comprehension failure?

[Retinend]

Some believe that, methodologically, "distorted" speech should be avoided. Say you're a student: you hear something sounding like "/kjrs/" said. Confused, you ask the teacher to repeat it: in a exagerated sing-songy way, she says "cuuriioous," and says what it means. Now... have you actually learned the word or just the "classroom" version of it?

Will you recognize it in the way it actually is said, "kjrs" when it comes up in the flow of a native speaker's thoughts? We're all familiar with not recognizing some sequence of simple words until the impatient third time someone repeats them for us. When all such words like "kjrs" are systemically slowed down for you in the classroom, will you recognize even most of the words you "know"?

The most egregious example I can think of is the word "the" and "a." English people learned in school that these words, influenced by the spelling, are pronounced /ðiː / and /æ/. So when those English people become English teachers they will pass this onto their students, although in the flow of speech the vowels are always lax or even unpronounced: "the man" "the end" /ðəman/ /ðend/, "a man" /əmæn/. When such common words are taught in a "distorted" way, is not the "helpful" slow pronunciation just doubling the effort needed to learn?

See page "v" of the introduction to this FSI Hungarian course to see a justification for the policy of never slowing down words to help students:
https://www.livelingua.com/fsi/Fsi-Hung ... ntText.pdf

"the instructor will maintain the normal tempo of pronunciation as the classroom standard at all
times; he will never distort his speech by slowing down"

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Now, after saying all that, I'd actually like to defend slowing down speech! I'm learning an exotic language at the moment and I find it very useful to slow down real recorded speech. Just as you can play a piece of music quickly only after you can play it well slowly, I can pronounce a word quickly (and have time register its meaning) only after I've mastered it slowly. VLC player is a great tool for understanding an exotic phonology, because it has a built-in tool which slows down speech without pitch-shifting it.

Secondly, I think that we natives speak to another as fast as we can manage - that is, with the highest possible sacrifice of phonological detail without distorting the message with one another. Just as habits of eating can become degraded, I think there's something to the traditional idea that speaking "properly" is a virtue. If teachers with regional accents always kept their natural tempo in a classroom, the student would be very well equipped... for that single idiom! English students cannot be expected to be ready for every individual set of rule-changes for every individual region of England, Scotland, the USA, Australia and so on. A slowly and properly spoken standard dialect is understood everywhere, and all natives can speak this way if they try.

So I'm kjrs how others think about this topic. To what extent is slowing down speech a bad thing for listening comprehension? Is it a sacrifice that pays off in other ways? Can a teacher really influence how well a student comprehends while listening, or is it more of an inherent ability?

[Ezy Ryder]

I don't think the (main) problem is low speed, but rather hyper-correctness. Although I would agree that speed of recall is important, too. I don't want to derail the topic, but it kinda reminds me of how some people insist on taking their time when reviewing vocabulary... If we speak at about 160 WPM, that's only ~375 ms per word on average.

[Cavesa]

I don't think the slowed-down speech is the problem (I am now very grateful for it in the Assimil Finnish course actually). The problem happens, when the student doesn't progress to faster and natural material.

I've seen it many times. Students with years of classes or other learning settings behind them. With solid knowledge of the basics. But as soon as they try native speed audio, they get scared and after 10 minutes: "I don't understand a thing, this is a waste of time, I need to return to classes before trying again as this leads nowhere". They simply never cross the barrier, never get out of the comfort zone and never improve in this aspect.

Even the course-bookish language or "hypercorrectness" is that much of a problem. Again, the problem happens, when the student fails to leave the comfort zone and enter the reality of fast language with some details omitted, other details changed, more registers used.

Sure, avoiding slow and distorted speech is an alternative. But I would say, it is up to the larner's style and the language they are learning. Anyone seriously learning a language needs to count with hundreds, even thousands, hours spent on it. If a small part of that time at the beginning is spent with slower audio, it shouldn't affect the result negatively. If majority of the time is spent like that, it is a problem

[Iversen]

There is a difference between slow speech and careful speech. Those who have tried to listen to spoken Danish will know what I'm speaking about (otherwise try European Portuguese). If native speakers speak Danish among themselves they routinely skip half the syllables, and the result has little to do with the written version. But we can pronounce all the syllables, and then those who can read the stuff actually have a chance to understand what we say - even though we pronounce the same number of syllables per minute (just all of them, which of course means that we get through less content in a given time span).

I have tried to listen to tapes from courseware with slow speech - and I couldn't stand it. When I do listen to one of my target languages I want to start out with clear, crisp pronounciation and good recordings without background noise before I try to understand less comprehensible speech. But not slow speech.

[PeterMollenburg]

I also don't think it's strictly a problem as such, unless the teacher is poor and pronounces words oddly while slowly them down.

I don't slow down speech with my learning tools such as language courses or video content.

I think the 'gap' experienced that you explain between 'classroom deliberately slowly enunciated utterances/words' to native speech, owing to lack of comprehension is not necessarily a problem of the slow utterances but a problem of not enough learning done. So you can start off with slow utterances but eventually you should be totally fine with normal native speed. Thus if there's a problem, it's that the student hasn't had enough exposure or done enough learning yet to be comfortable with native speed.

I have followed the path of slow words----through to--->now almost native pace often/and native pace sometimes (depending on the language activity). However what I do do is to slow my own speech down (particularly in the beginning stages of learning a language) after hearing a word/phrase pronounced on a recording in the language i'm learning. I don't slow the recording down. In other words I hear the phrase/word(s), pause the recording, repeat the utterance, and if I'm having trouble producing one or a succession of phonemes or am new to them (completely or somewhat) then I'll deliberately pronounce the word(s) slowly, carefully reproducing all the of the phonemes present in the utterance. I then speed it (my speech) up again (within that learning session) again pronouncing it out loud up to the point I can produce it like the recording at the faster pace. This sort of practice has helped me immensely in producing a good accent and in becoming very comfortable articulating the foreign language. And not only do I slow my speaking out loud/imitating within a moment in a study session and also speed it up, but I also gradually over time (months/years) have sped up my 'overall speech' as I've become more comfortable with the language. Thus there is no longer that 'classroom gap' (i'm calling it that) that a beginner may have from slowly enunciated words to the real world, which you point out in the first post.

[Cainntear]

Yup. The problem is that most teachers are not consciously aware of how they speak naturally. What a teacher should is exaggerate their natural speech, they misinterpret the idea of speaking clearly and pronounce written letters instead of exaggerating the spoken sounds.

But a teacher should slow down, exaggerating the correct pronunciation. A schwa vowel exaggerate remains a schwa vowel, and not /a/ or /e/ or anything else. A y-glide should never become /i/ (and certainly not /i:/). But most teachers make those changes and mangle what they teach.

When I was teaching English overseas, I had the difficulty that people often were upset by my use of schwa, and put it down to my "Scottish accent" and the fact that their last teacher had an "English accent". No -- their last teacher wasn't pronouncing words properly. No-one overseas ever really understood that. My students in Scotland generally did, though.

[Soclydeza]

I'm definitely a proponent of slowing down speech in the early stages, though I guess it depends on the language. When I was first starting out with French, one thing that bothered me is that many of the resources I used took the "start off at (or near) native speed" approach; the problem with French is that this can make things sound jumbled together and if I was to emulate what I heard, I would have sounded like a drunkard slurring his speech since my ear would just skim over those slight, yet important, intermediary sounds. I think Assimil does a great job with this, since it starts off painfully slow in the early lessons to allow your ear to adjust and then gradually speeds up in subsequent lessons. I used to get very frustrated with Pimsleur when I started out because sometimes they would just speed through a phrase at (what sounded to me like) native speed and I couldn't make out those subtle nuances in the sound and therefore couldn't accurately reproduce it. But again, it depends on the language. I had no problem with this in German, since German (Hochdeutsch) is very consonant-rich in its sound and very well defined for a listener to discern certain sounds.

Just as you mentioned with music, it is important for someone learning an instrument to practice a scale/piece very slowly to get used to all of the nuances of the sound. Once that is mastered then you can truly say that you have learned that skill.

[lusan]

Anyone seriously learning a language needs to count with hundreds, even thousands, hours spent on it.

Every nice. I love this quote.

[arthaey]

Sure, avoiding slow and distorted speech is an alternative. But I would say, it is up to the larner's style and the language they are learning.

I agree that the issue is often students shy away from native speech as a source to study because it's "too hard", not realizing that pushing themselves to try is exactly what their brains needs to slowly learn to understand it.

The only distorted/noisy speech that I "let" myself not worry about is when I'd have trouble understanding in English, too. Once I remembered that I have trouble with conversations in noisy bars in my native language, I stopped having unreasonable expectations for myself in Spanish.

[Cainntear]

Sure, avoiding slow and distorted speech is an alternative. But I would say, it is up to the larner's style and the language they are learning.

I agree that the issue is often students shy away from native speech as a source to study because it's "too hard", not realizing that pushing themselves to try is exactly what their brains needs to slowly learn to understand it.

I think the problem is lack of progression. Almost all made-for-learners stuff is really slow, so you have to jump suddenly from that to real material.

Speed is only generally graded if you look at exam-focused material, as each exam expects you to understand quicker and quicker material, but exam progress is generally slow, and if you're not exposed to full-speed language before you're prepping for a C2 DELE, you're not going to be able to engage with the language in real life, and if you can't engage with the language in real life, how are you going to get to C2?

What I would love to see happening is technology being actively used by the publishers. With the death of tapes and audio CDs for courses, there's no reason they couldn't repeat the same audio multiple times at different speeds. Why shouldn't Assimil add in an extra revision wave where you go back and listen to previous lessons spoken faster? I used to relisten to my Assimil Catalan quite frequently, but I was always stuck listening at the same speed. Seems like a wasted opportunity when storage is now so cheap.