[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

In a previous post I explained some of the reasons why we should focus on bottom-up strategies for listening and reading. In this post, I’d like to show how this might work in practice for the skill of listening.

Even learners who have a good range of grammar and vocabulary can struggle with understanding natural speech. And the same is true even for listeners who have a reasonable grasp of the topic and good prediction skills (usually associated with top-down strategies). There could be a number of reasons for this, but one essential reason is that they have difficulty in decoding the “signal” which is coming at them. By “decoding”, I mean perceiving the sounds of English and linking them mentally to words and phrases that they have in their store of language. (Even so-called native speakers struggle with this – for example, the recent case of a man who thought the phrase “as opposed to” was “as a pose to” until he was nearly 20.)

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

English grammar has been closely bound up with that of Latin since the 16^th century, when English first began to be taught in schools. Given that grammatical instruction prior to this had focused on Latin, it’s not surprising that teachers based their grammars of English on that of Latin. The title of John Hewes’ work of 1624 neatly encapsulates its desire to make English grammar conform to that of Latin: A Perfect Survey of The English Tongve, Taken According to the Vse and Analogie of the Latine. Since English is not derived from Latin, and has a very different grammatical structure, this is not a helpful model.

Despite this, eighteenth century grammarians persisted in imposing the Latinate structure on English, as shown in this treatment of the English noun declension by Wells Egelsham in A Short Sketch of English Grammar (1780):

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

We know even less about the origin of idioms than about the origin of individual words. This is natural: words have tangible components: roots, suffixes, consonants, vowels, and so forth, while idioms spring from customs, rites, and general experience. Yet both are apt to travel from land to land and be borrowed. Who was the first to suggest that beating (or flogging) a willing horse is a silly occupation, and who countered it with the idea that beating a dead horse is equally stupid? We will probably never find “the author,” even if we catch the earliest citation in print or dispose of such idioms as so-called familiar quotations (a great wit may have coined one or both of those sayings or used the phrases already current and thus made them famous). Who in the past kicked the bucket and when? Who sowed wild oats, and why just oats? Occasionally I discuss such matters. Raining cats and dogs, pay through the nose, no room to swing a cat,whip the cat, and a few more have turned up in this blog.

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