• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
IELTS Advantage

IELTS Advantage

IELTS Preparation Courses

  • Success Stories
  • Resources
    • IELTS Writing Task 1 (In 2023)
    • IELTS Writing Task 2 (In 2023)
    • IELTS Speaking (In 2023)
    • IELTS Reading (In 2023)
    • IELTS Listening
    • IELTS Vocabulary
  • Contact Us
  • VIP Course

Improving IELTS Listening Through Connected Speech

Home » Improving IELTS Listening Through Connected Speech

Image: img_0916

Ask your IELTS students which skill they are most worried about and listening will probably be top of the list. Most courses seem to put most emphasis on the productive skills, at the expense of reading and listening. Most textbooks don’t even teach you what connected speech is!

This post will teach you about connected speech, the inadequacies of IELTS textbooks in preparing students for the listening test and suggest some alternatives for preparing from home.

Connected Speech

Many learners are used to sympathetic teachers talking clearly and emphatically. They often focus on how the individual word sounds and this problem becomes worse the more removed their language is from English.

Once words are used in a natural rapid-fire sentence, this dependence on how individual words sound causes big problems. Some sounds disappear, some sounds are added and others seem to join together.

  1. Weakening of Vowels

Many vowels that were previously stressed in isolated words become weakened and are replaced by the ‘schwa’.

Example:

What are you doing? The ‘you’ changes from /ju:/ to /jə/.

  1. Elision

Some sounds disappear altogether when said in a sentence. For example, you might teach your students that ‘probably’ sounds like /prɒlɪ/ when it appears in a natural sentence.

It is also common for the /t/ sound to disappear from the end of words. For example, /neks/ instead of /nekst/ in the phrase ‘I’ll see you next week’.

  1. Assimilation

A lot of pronunciation is about efficiency and speakers often modify their pronunciation in order to save effort.

Example:

‘Ten bikes’ sounds like ‘tem bikes’. Say both. Which is easier to say?

  1. Catenation

When the last sound of a word is a consonant and the next sound is a vowel, they link. Think about how you would naturally say this sentence:

Is it a boy or a girl?

‘Is’, ‘it’ and ‘a’ will all link; as will ‘or’ and ‘a’.

  1. Intrusion

When the last sound of a word is a vowel and the next sound is also a vowel, we often add an extra sound which may be either  / j /, / w / or / r /.

For example:

Law(r)and order.

IELTS Course Books

I looked at six of the most popular IELTS textbooks from four of the main publishers. Four of these books specialised in teaching students listening skills. Wouldn’t you expect them to deal with connected speech? Only one had a very small section on it and merely one exercise. Both general books dealt with it, but only within the context of speaking.

Most of the tasks in IELTS books focus on pre-listening skills. Course books seem obsessed with activating schema and asking the students to predict what they are going to hear. Although these are worthwhile things to do, if no post-listening work is done we are simply testing listening, rather than developing it.

Cuisenaire Rods

Image: cusienaire-rods-ielts

If you haven’t used these before, I would highly recommend doing so – they have a myriad of different uses in the classroom!

For connected speech, I normally ask students to put one block for each word they hear and then change it as they hear how words become connected. They can also use different coloured blocks for the different types of connected speech.

Image: img_0916

As you can see in the picture above, after the first listening the students could only hear two words and they have therefore placed two blocks above the words they hear. At this stage, it doesn’t matter if they are wrong and should just write exactly what they hear. After a few listens they have broken the sentence down into five words and placed five blocks above the words. They are then asked to think about the connected speech and place a different coloured block above each connection according to the type of sound that is added, joined or lost.

This really makes the students think about the sounds and connections and is even better if done in pairs or small groups as it leads to a lot of discussion. Most students also appreciate the visual element.

If you don’t have access to the rods you can use modelling clay, like I’ve done in the picture above. Post-it notes would work quite well.

Learning at Home

If you do this enough in class, students can start to identify and get used to connected speech when they are practising at home. I ask students to listen to as much English as possible at home, whether it be movies, podcasts, songs or just the news. When they don’t quite get what someone is saying, I advise them to pause it and listen back until they have figured out exactly what has been said. This kind of active listening is far more beneficial than passively listening to songs or TV.

For more help with improving your IELTS Listening skills, click this link to join my free IELTS Fundamentals Course. 

It contains free video lessons for each section of the IELTS exam, practice exercises, answer sheets, and much more!

Click here to sign up for free.

About Christopher Pell

My name is Christopher Pell and I'm the Managing Director of IELTS Advantage.

I started IELTS Advantage as a simple blog to help 16 students in my class. Several years later, I am very humbled that my VIP Course has been able to help thousands of people around the world to score a Band 7+ in their IELTS tests.

If you need my help with your IELTS preparation, you can send me an email using the contact us page.

18 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Primary Sidebar

Navigation

  • IELTS Preparation Guide
  • IELTS Writing Task 1 (In 2023)
  • IELTS Writing Task 2 (In 2023)
  • IELTS Reading (In 2023)
  • IELTS Speaking (In 2023)
  • IELTS Vocabulary
  • IELTS Listening
  • IELTS Tips
  • IELTS Practice: Ultimate Free Guide
  • IELTS For Teachers
  • IELTS Writing Correction Service

Footer

Contact us

Email: chris@ieltsadvantage.com
Over 2,000,000 collective followers!
Image: ielts-facebook
Image: ielts-instagram
Image: ielts-yt
  • Blog
  • Success Stories
  • Our Team
  • Our Principles
  • FAQ & Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Terms and Conditions
  • About Author
  • Subscribe
  • IELTS VIP Ambassador Program
  • Cookies Policy
© 2021 IELTS Advantage All rights reserved. Registered Company Number NI637423. Advantage Exam Preparation Limited. 4 Castleglen Park, Dundrum, County Down, BT33 0WL United Kingdom. The information on this site is for information purposes only. IELTS is a registered trademark of University of Cambridge, the British Council, and IDP Education Australia. This site and its owners are not affiliated, approved or endorsed by the University of Cambridge ESOL, the British Council, and IDP Education Australia. For full information please refer to our terms and conditions and disclaimer.
wpDiscuz