ELT365 · Day 171 — Features of Spoken Language

Idea — Spoken language is full of false starts, fillers, contractions, ellipsis, and overlap. Listening tasks must reflect this — not clean written English read aloud.

Example — ‘I — yeah, so basically, he didn’t — he couldn’t come’ is natural speech. ‘He was unable to attend’ is not.

Try — Record yourself speaking for 30 seconds on any topic. Transcribe it. Count the fillers and incomplete sentences.

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