EFL Teachers' Attitudes Towards Reduced Forms Instruction

For one of my listening classes, I assigned my pre-intermediate students to watch the film “Identity”, and write in a dialogue format what they could hear during the first ten minutes of the film. The next day, a couple of my students came to my office to express their inability to comprehend the language in the assigned period. This was surprising to me as I knew that these students’ listening comprehension had improved. Therefore, I watched the film again myself and realized that the film included several “reduced forms” which might hinder students’ comprehension. To investigate whether those reduced forms had caused a lack of understanding of the film, I transcribed the dialogue and studied the film with my students in class, which made me aware that it was not the unknown vocabulary or any other reasons, but the “reduced forms”. Since then, I have been concerned about the question of whether we should teach our students these forms and whether these forms facilitate comprehension in listening classes. This experience of mine triggered me to investigate my colleagues’ feelings about teaching reduced forms, their familiarity with these forms and the challenges they face when teaching them.

Understanding spoken English should not be as difficult as my students think, as Willis’(1990) study suggested that if a student knows 3000 to 5000 words, s/he is very likely to comprehend at least the 70% of the speech made by native speakers of English. However, there are some factors influencing students’ listening comprehension negatively. Listening is a process affected by the character of the listener, the speaker, the content of the message, and any visual support that accompanies the message (Brown & Yule, 1983).

Among many suggestions as to the causes of the difficulty in understanding spoken English, the researchers seem to agree on the idea that reduced forms are the main cause of it. Goh (2000) and Chen (2002) claimed that students do not recognize words they know while listening and Sun (2002) made a similar suggestion that students cannot segment speech, and that makes listening difficult.

In order to understand spoken English, Richards (1983) proposes a number of skills that the listener has to learn. They should:

retain chunks of language in short-term memory.
discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language.
recognize stress and rhythm patterns, tone patterns, intonational contours.
recognize “reduced forms” of words.
distinguish word boundaries.
recognize typical word-order patterns.
recognize vocabulary.
detect key words, such as those identifying topics and ideas.
guess meaning from context.
recognize grammatical word classes.
recognize basic syntactic patterns.
recognize cohesive devices.
detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, and the like.

Speech is an on-going stream of sounds, with no borderlines between each word. In spoken English, we speak with maximal economy of movement rather than maximal clarity. As a result, some words are lost, and some phonemes are linked together as we try to convey our message. However, in the class, instructors speak a standard, clear, comprehensible English to get the message across to their students, and the listening materials used in their classes are most of the time “adapted” and sound “unnatural”(Rosa, 2002) . Teachers modify their speech in four areas: phonology, lexis (consisting of morphology and vocabulary), syntax, and discourse.

Chaudron (1988) underlines some of their in-class modifications by differentating between natural and in-class talk.

Brown (1990) suggests that students who come from English learning backgrounds in which they got used to slow speech are often shocked when they find themselves in a situation in which native speakers are talking to each other. In this situation, they have difficulty in understanding what is said. Natural English, whether formal or informal, fast or slow, is full of these reduced forms and this creates a serious obstacle for students who have little or no exposure to reduced forms.(Rosa, 2002)

Ur (1984) claims that when a student learns a new word or an expression, he usually learns its written and spoken form in its formal and slow form. However, he/she does not learn how this word sounds when it is said quickly or in an emphasized way in a sentence. Therefore, when the word is pronounced differently from its formal way, the listener may simply not recognize the word. From what Ur suggested, it would be fair to say that helping students with natural realistic sounds will improve students' listening ability. Underwood (1989) holds the idea that when encountered with speech they have not heard before, students find that the sounds are lost as the speakers focus on the message rather than the dictation. Students have difficulty in connecting the sounds they hear with words they have seen and recognized in print form.

Fan (1993) supports the previous research and draws our attention to a cultural fact regarding the way that most students in Asian countries have been exposed to a language teaching method in which they were used to seeing words written in their textbooks, and these students are weak when it comes to identifying these words in spoken English.

If it is a fact that reduced forms are affecting listening comprehension, and if these forms are one of the most neglected areas of listening comprehension, as Weinstein (1985), claims, and if authenticity has gained importance in recent years, what are some ways to improve our students listening comprehension from the point of teaching reduced forms? The answer to the question is hidden in the advertisement below:

As the advertisement above about a software program to help students improve their listening skill emphasizes, students should be provided with as many authentic conversations as possible which include real discourse (pitch change, stressed words and linked words, hesitations, rephrasing, and a variety of accents).

Reduced forms are the spontaneous pronunciation changes in adjacent words or sounds spoken at a natural speed. Some prevalent examples include /gonna/, /wanna/, /hafta/ and /gotta/ (Bowen, 1975). Bowen uses the term “reduction” as universal and an ever-present phenomenon in spoken English. Crystal (1997) calls such forms “sandhi forms” and Ur (1984) calls them “weak forms”. These forms are the changes that occur in natural speech due to the environment or context in which words are found (Herschenhorn 1979). Brown and Hilferty (1986) use the term "reduced forms" to refer collectively to the processes of contraction, elision, assimilation, and reduction (e.g., there's, coulda, wanna, and howarya for "there is," "could have," "want to," and "how are you," respectively.

Weinstein, in her interview with Voice of America (10 January, 2007) gives the following answer to the question of whether one’s interlocutor may think that the speaker is an uneducated person in a job interview or in the class:

As can be seen from the above definitions, some researchers have taken “reduced forms” as an aspect of natural speed (Bowen, 1975), and others consider it as one of the most common features of informal situations (Weinstein,1982). One of Weinstein’s studies proves how common it is to use reduced forms in spoken English. In a seven-hour unscripted recording by highly-educated native English speakers in both formal and informal situations, 305 reduced forms were used (Weinstein, 1982).

Rosa (2002) summarizes that reduced forms are a common element of spoken English, found in all registers and all rates of speech. While register and rate may contribute to some rules of appropriateness or production in general, reduced forms affect all areas and types of spoken English.

The aspects of reduced forms mentioned in the survey about the attitudes of AIBU’s EFL instructors towards “reduced form instruction” are as follows:

Assimilation: Assimilation is the process during which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound. Examples include ‘could have = coulda’ and ‘have to = hafta’. For instance, in North American English, after the voiceless /t/, the pronunciation of s is a voiceless /s/ as in cats, whereas the pronunciation of s is a voiced /z/ when it follows a voiced consonant like /g/ as in dogs.

Elision (Linking of words): Elision is the omission of one or more sounds, such as the /d/ sound in ‘fish and chips’ or the /er/ sound in ‘comfortable’. Elision also occurs at word boundaries. For example, the citation form of old is /old/, but the last consonant is often dropped in connected speech as in He's a good ol' boy.

Contraction: This is a written manifestation of a small set of connected speech processes, which are often used in written dialogue to give a spoken flavor. Examples include I'm, don't, she's, they'll, we're, you'd, etc.

Word stress: This can be defined as the way the stressed syllables in a word (which is, in turn, the smallest distinctive unit that can stand on its own in speaking or writing) are organized in terms of their relative prominence. On the other hand, sentence stress can be defined simply as the pattern of stress groups in a sentence (or utterance, since they are typically oral). Reduced forms are produced when the unstressed function words are blended, contracted, linked, deleted, assimilated, or reduced to combine with other function words as well as content words of a sentence.

Content words: These are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, question words, and demonstratives. Function words serve mainly a grammatical function and include articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns, conjunctions, and relative pronouns. While content words which carry information tend to receive stress, function words which “signify grammatical relationships” tend to be unstressed, and consequently reduced (Celce-Murcia et al., 1996 in Brown, 2006).

The English schwa sound: This aspect occurs in connected speech when the phonemes of a language are changed, minimized, or eliminated in order to make pronunciation easier. For instance, in North American English, the vowels found in unstressed syllables are most often reduced to schwa /ə/ or incorporated into a syllabic consonant like /ŋ/. In the example of “television”, which would be pronounced as te le vi zhin, there are four other acceptable forms in different dialects: te la vi zhin, te la vi zhun, te la vi zhn, and even a three syllable version tel vi zhn.

Taking all these aspects into consideration and from my own experience, it would be fair to suggest that in the listening materials used in our classes, these aspects are given little or no place to help students improve their listening comprehension. Therefore, when students find themselves in a situation where English is spoken naturally, they have difficulty in carrying out a conversation. Similarly, in case of a Hollywood film on TV with all the aspects mentioned above, students cannot catch many of the words as they are somehow reduced.

Richards (1983) thinks that if students master these various aspects of connected speech, their speech sounds more English. Perhaps even more significantly, if they manipulate the norms properly, they are, in fact, "acting" more English.

On the other hand, Norris (1995) conducted a study on Japanese students’ awareness of reduced forms by introducing the 20 common forms in Weinstain’s “Waddaya Say?” in order to find out whether teaching reduced forms will have a positive impact on listening comprehension. Dictation and cloze exercises were used as main activities. Moreover, Norris enabled his students to get as much exposure as possible by assigning them to listen to natural English, such as listening to journals. At the end of this two-year study, he observed that students’ listening comprehension had improved a lot.

A similar study was done by Brown and Hilferty (1986), who looked into the effectiveness of teaching reduced forms on L2 listening comprehension by making a comparison between a treatment group which was exposed to reduced forms instruction, and a control group which worked on minimal pairs practice rather than reduced forms. To test the progress and compare these groups, three measures were utilized: the Bowen Integrative Grammar Test, a norm-referenced multiple-choice listening test, and reduced-forms dictations. The results revealed that the treatment group’s post-test score was higher than the control group’s on all three measures.

Rosa’s paper (2002), which the survey used in the current study was taken from, has revealed valuable data regarding ESL teachers’ feeling about “reduced forms instruction”. Rosa (2002) carried out a study of ESL teachers’ attitudes on reduced form teaching at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. 52 surveys were distributed to ESL instructors in Oahou. In terms of teachers’ familiarity with reduced forms, she came to the conclusion that teachers consider themselves very or somewhat familiar with the role of reduced forms in spoken English. Also, it has been revealed that teachers spend little time on teaching these forms. When they teach these forms, they prefer teaching them in a context with common examples rather than through the system of linguistic rules and constraints. Almost all teachers considered teaching reduced forms to be helpful in improving students’ listening comprehension; on the contrary, most of them usually spend only 10% or less of a typical class. Almost all of the participants reported that their students seemed somewhat or very interested in reduced form teaching. 42% percent of all the participants considered that their limited focus on reduced form instruction is a result of lack of time and materials.

Practicing using reduced forms when speaking English will make you use them more effectively (Weinstein, 1982). Learning the fifty to seventy most common reduced forms contextualized in simple but natural spoken English is the right step to take. As gonna/, /wanna/ and /hafta/ are the most common reduced forms, teachers may start with these.

Using background knowledge and relating prior knowledge to the new information contained in the spoken text are suggested by Hasan (2000). He also emphasized the importance of pre-teaching reduced forms.

Using rhyme and verse as a means of teaching problematic sounds, including reduced forms, are also recommended (Marks,1999).

Students need to be cautioned about when and where to use the various forms of connected speech (Brown, 2006).

Promoting practice through cloze tests and dictation is proposed by Norris (1995). Also, analyzing spoken discourse and activities which are meaningful, purposeful, communicative and task-based will also improve your awareness of “reduced forms”. Norris warns teachers that first teachers themselves should be aware of the high frequency reduced forms occurring in spoken English before setting out to give students practice in recognizing them.

Norris also uses the metaphor of “putting the cart before the horse” to illustrate the situation in which teachers directly starts with listening comprehension activities requiring students to use native speaker processing skills without first giving the students activities to help them identify the sounds they hear.

Please scroll down to the appendix to see a lesson plan for teaching reduced forms.

1. What are EFL teachers’ attitudes towards the role of reduced forms in teaching listening comprehension?

A survey of 15 questions was given randomly to 30 instructors who are all teaching the preparatory classes of the Science and Letters Faculty, and 26 of the surveys were returned. The survey was taken from Rosa (2002), who used it in the study “DON’CHA KNOW? A survey of ESL teachers’ perspectives on reduced forms instruction”. Rosa conducted this study with ESL teachers in Hawaii at Mānoa and, for the current study, the same survey was used with EFL Turkish instructors teaching at university level. The items in the survey were all about the perception of the participants’ perspectives about “reduced form” instruction. There were “yes or no options” , “Likert scales”, and “checklists” in which teachers could check as many elements as were applicable in the survey.

Item 1 requested information about their experience with learning reduced forms, either from textbooks or in a teacher training program. Item 2 was related to their understanding of the role of reduced forms in spoken English. Item 3 required instructors to define what a “reduced form” was. Item 4 was intended to reveal the aspects of connected speech with which instructors were familiar. The next item was concerned with the feeling of the participants about the effectiveness of teaching “reduced forms” in listening classes and how helpful it could bet for students’ comprehension.

The seventh item was a direct question: “Have you taught reduced forms in your classes?” If the answer was “yes” to this question, respondents had to explain how much time they devoted to “reduced forms” instruction in an hour-long class, what percentage of students they thought were interested in learning these forms, how they taught reduced forms, and the challenges they faced in the process of teaching them.

The last item was about how the role of reduced forms instruction should be in the future from the perspective of the instructors (increasing/decreasing or staying the same). The data was entered onto a spreadsheet and the frequency of the respondent circling different options for each question was reflected in this paper. An overall analysis of the results will be discussed later on in this article in the discussion section.

The results revealed that only 8 out of 26 instructors gave the answer “yes” to Question 1a. As for question “b”, 16 responded “no”. As an answer to “c”, the majority (18 people) claimed that reduced forms were not covered in any of their teacher training. 10 of the respondents agreed that they learned reduced forms from text-books.

Most of the participants (18) claimed to be somewhat familiar with the role of reduced forms in spoken English. The rest chose not very familiar. The other options were not marked by any of the respondents.

3. Which description best reflects your view of the use of reduced forms? (Please check one.)

While 20 respondents stated that the use of reduced forms was something occurring most often in casual and informal spoken English, only 6 thought that these forms occurred in fast spoken English. I nterestingly, none went for the last option.

4. Please check all the following aspects of reduced forms with which you are familiar:

__Assimilation of sounds__ Linking of sounds__ Deletions of sounds__ Contractions

The aspect which was considered as familiar by nearly all the participants was “contractions” (22 respondents), whereas the least familiar one was marked as the English schwa sound, as it was chosen by only 4 participants.

5. Do you consider reduced forms to be an important element in teaching EFL listening comprehension?

__Very important __Somewhat important __Not very important __Not important at all

Despite the high number of respondents indicating that they were somewhat important (12), some circled the option “not very important” (8) and “not important at all”(5). Only one of the instructors gave the answer “very important”.

6. How helpful do you feel reduced forms instruction might be for your students’ listening comprehension?

The option “somewhat helpful”(11) and “very helpful” (8) were marked by the majority of the participants. On the other hand, the options “not very helpful” (4) and “not helpful at all” (3) were chosen by only a few.

7. Have you taught reduced forms in your classes? (Please check all that apply.)

__I have addressed reduced forms with respect to students' listening comprehension.

The most common option was teaching reduced forms in the class when they came up in context, with 14 respondents. The second was teaching reduced forms with respect to students’ pronunciation (6). The third was teaching these forms with respect to students’ listening comprehension (5). Explicitly teaching them was chosen by only one person, which makes it the least favorite choice.

8. In any given class session (for example one 50-minute class period), how much time do you typically devote to reduced forms instruction?

10% of a lesson period was devoted to teaching reduced forms by an overwhelming majority of instructors.(21 respondents).

9. With respect to reduced forms instruction, what percentage of your students seem to be:

More than half of the instructors claimed that their students did not seem very interested in learning reduced forms (15), while 6 indicated that students were somewhat interested, and 5 marked the option “not interested at all”

“Seldom” was the mostly preferred option among respondentss with a number of 14 participants.

11. I teach reduced forms as a system of pragmatic (appropriate social context) rules and constraints.

This time, most of the respondents (12) changed their idea and marked “often” in response to this question.

A vast majority of the participants (18) indicated that they “often” taught reduced forms within context, using common examples.

13. What are the challenges you face when teaching reduced forms: (Please check all that apply).

The preferred options from the most selected to the least is as follows: “Not enough time available in the course” (10), “not identified as a need by the students” (9), “not in the curriculum” (5), and finally “not enough available material” (2).

15. Would you like to see the role of reduced forms in your own EFL classroom in the future?

Almost all the respondents agreed on the point that the role of reduced forms in the classroom should increase in the future.

Despite the small number of participants in this study, findings shed light on the perspectives of EFL instructors about “reduced forms instruction” and may possibly be generalized if the survey questionnaire can be given to a large group of respondents.

Taking the results into consideration, it would be fair to suggest that the respondents who filled in the survey questionnaire have not been taught reduced forms in their teacher training programs and this has an influence on their teaching behavior of these forms. Many other factors affecting instructors’ feelings about reduced forms instruction can be listed: teachers’ or students’ earlier learning experiences, the English language teaching philosophy of the teacher, learning styles, the requirements of the administration, the challenges in teaching them ,etc.

The time they devote (10%) to teaching these forms may be a result of their earlier experience. Another factor affecting teachers’ and students’ focus in the classroom, especially in preparatory ones, could be the concern of the proficiency exam, which is largely based on “structural knowledge” and “reading comprehension”. The number of questions and the points given to each question in these sections are higher than listening and speaking sections, requiring an awareness of reduced forms. If students can easily get a passing score in these exams and if the textbook does not really include anything regarding reduced forms instruction, then the results of the survey are not surprising. In this case, students do not identify knowing reduced forms as necessary and even sometimes refer to listening and speaking classes as “listening and sleeping” classes, and have a tendency to think that these classes are not worth attending, as they are not tested on their pronunciation or understanding of reduced forms in the proficiency exam.

Since most of the participants in this survey have picked up reduced forms from films, books or any other informal means, they define reduced forms as occurring in casual and informal speech. They think that these forms depend on the context; therefore, they would rather teach these forms when they come up in context. They are familiar with most of the aspects of reduced forms, but contractions are the most familiar as this feature is the only explicitly taught one as a grammatical rule in our textbooks as far as connected speech is concerned. As the least familiar aspect of connected speech, teachers marked the English schwa sound, even though this sound is very common in natural English.

Our responsibility as teachers is to be aware of reduced forms and the possible problems students may face if not made aware of them. Raising students’ awareness of these forms is the first step towards helping your learners to speak a little more naturally. In addition, this awareness can help in making students better understand the language they hear.

Our students should be provided with authentic activities to make them get used to recognizing reduced forms when they occur. By exposing students to authentic speech and giving them the opportunity to use it, we can accomplish much. Richards (1983) considers reduced forms to be essential in developing both listening comprehension and speaking.

Taking the results of the survey into consideration, students should come to an understanding that English learning requires more than grammar and reading comprehension, and the distribution of skills in the exams should be carefully done. Also, for our students to be more “reduced-form conscious”, listening and speaking lessons should be given more emphasis and extra-curricular activities, such as speaking or cinema classes, should be organized.

Bowen, J.D.(1975). Patterns of English Pronunciation. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.

Brown, G &Yule, G (1983). Teaching the spoken language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, J. D., & Hilferty, A. G. (1986). The effectiveness of teaching reduced forms for listening comprehension. RELC Journal, 17 (2), 59-70.

Brown, J. D (2006). Authentic communication: Whyzit importan' ta teach reduced forms? Shizuoka, Japan: Tokai University College of Marine Science. (p. 13 - 24).

Chen, S.W (2002). Problems in listening comprehension for learners of EFL. Studies in English Language and Literature,10,57-70.

Crystal, D.(1997). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Fan, Y.(1993).Listening: Problems and solutions. English Teaching Forum, 31(1), 16-19.

Goh, C.C.M (2000). A cognitive perspective on listening comprehension problems. System, 28, 55-75.

Hasan, A.(2000). Learners’ perceptions of listening comprehension problems. Language, Culture and Curriculum,13,137-152.

Norris, R.W (1995). Teaching reduced forms: Putting the horse before the cart. English Teaching Forum, 33, 47-50.

Richards, J. C. (1983). Listening comprehension: Approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly, 17(2), 219-240.

Rosa (2002). A survey of ESL teachers’ perspectives on reduced forms instruction. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Sun, K.C. (2002).Investigation of English listening difficulties of Taiwan students. The 11^th Conference on English Teaching and Learning in the Republic of China, 518-525. Taipei: Crane.

Ur.P. (1984). Teaching listening comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Objectives

Lesson Plan

I wanna be with you...
'cos I'm eighteen...
Lights are gonna find me...
All you've gotta do...
I bet you think this song's 'bout you, don't you?

Play it again, pausing after each line and getting students to repeat the lines. Play it one last time to let students take notes of the song and practice the song with their partners.

Presentation: Ask the question: “Was the song hard to understand? Why/Why not?” After eliciting students’ responses, ask them to write the lines of the song in standard written English and sing the song again to their partner in its formal, standard, written form. Ask them how they feel about the two different versions of the song.

Talk about the reasons why there are lines like “I wanna be with you” rather than “I want to be with you”. Ask them to give similar examples in English. Add some more examples of sentences with reduced forms on the board. (Connected speech forms taught on an EFL program in China, adapted from Brown & Hilferty, 1982, 1995).

Practice: Ask them to identify the reduced forms in the sentences above and make them repeat the sentences below quickly three or more times to their partners and let them feel the change in the sentences when uttered quickly after a couple of repetitions. At the end, read the sentences quickly yourself and make them repeat after you.

Production: Play a dialogue between two students in the cafeteria and ask students to jot down the full formal form of the second words of each sentence. (if it is something like /‘s/,they should write “is”). Play it once and give them to students to peer check the words they could catch. After checking students’ words, let them practice the dialogue as it is in the listening material.

Assignment: Watch the film “Identity” or any other American movie, and write down the reduced forms you can catch in the first ten minutes of the film. You can also work on a pop song.