Well, this is quite a mouthful of a name, so as this blog is always about pronunciation, let’s just refer to receptive competence, which is the listener’s ability to make sense of whatever it is that the other person is saying, or, to put it technically, to decode the incoming acoustic signal. Receptive competence, as […]
Tag Archives: listening
I was in Seville the other day, bound for Algeciras. The name brought back echoes of my childhood – on Sunday mornings in the 1960s the BBC had a radio programme where families could ask for music for loved ones who were serving abroad with the British Forces. Many of these servicemen and women were […]
Just over a month ago, after an incident in the car approaching Murcia, I posted about top-down processing. Well, I’ve just been back to Murcia, and have had a great time working with staff at the city’s Universidad Católica, and at the Politécnica de Cartagena. As fate would have it, on my way back up to Madrid I […]
I was working in Murcia today, back again in Medtirranean Spain as part of my work for Trinity College. My hotel is in Alicante, so I set off early towards Murcia, pondering en route as to how I might get the idea of top-down and bottom-up processing across to my audience during the first part of […]
I was in the Basque Country today in Northern Spain. Basque, of course, is a notoriously difficult language to learn, much like Welsh or Hungarian. No obvious roots and quite unlike anything most of us are used to. On leaving the building at the end of the session, though, I came across this on the […]
Take a look at this photo. It’s the first letter of a four-letter word. I saw it in the street in Madrid so it’s in Spanish. However, the word in question is spelt the same way in English. The question is, which letter is it? Now go to the bottom of this post and take a […]
Paintball has been around for some time now. I’ve seen it advertised alongside other adventure sports but have never been tempted, although I have heard that at close range the capsules containing the ‘paint’ (water soluble dye), can actually sting on impact. What was interesting, however, was to come across this Spanish company that had […]
In my post of December 6 I drew attention to ELF Pronunciation, the blog that Katy Davies and Laura Patsko run. Both women are practising teachers in Dubia and London, respectively, where they work with multilingual classes. Many of the students in these classes use English in ELF contexts, i.e. for international communication usually in the […]
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