The Sound of Language: The Don’t-know, the Rarely-thought-of, and the Missed Opportunities in Foreign Language Teaching

Link to the Zoom meeting:

https://hkbu.zoom.us/j/91540031416

Meeting ID: 915 4003 1416

The field of second/foreign language (L2/FL) teaching and learning has seen significant advancements in recent decades. Yet, unearthing knowledge often leads to the creation of more questions. To date, many FL educators and learners (and scholars) do not seem to pay much attention to the fundamentality of sound in language teaching and learning. The issues to be discussed, in a way, can be summarized as Do-Re-Mi: The Don’t-know, the Rarely-thought-of (‘Ra’ pronounced as /re/), and the Missed opportunities in FL teaching and learning. These correspond respectively to important questions that are as yet unaddressed, significant topics of which some FL stakeholders are unaware, and promising channels or acts that are still underutilized. In this talk, I will discuss the potential value of sound and associated constructs (e.g. spoken input; listening) in multiple facets of language learning. As clichéd as it sounds, the talk will likely end by leaving the audience with more questions than before, but this embodies a promising first step towards recognizing FLs as having an organic sound-rich nature rather than, as many learners (and others) tend to assume, silent codes (trillions of strings of randomly combined letters to be memorized) and mundane rules (grammar).

Art(hur) Tsang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). As an English language teacher educator and an applied researcher, his three main research areas are: (1) Oral communication in language education, (2) learners’ perceptions, emotions, experiences, and well-being, and (3) innovative language teaching methods (especially learning beyond the classroom). His publications have appeared in various international journals such as Language Teaching Research, System, and TESOL Quarterly. More information about him can be found at: https://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/cri/faculty/prof-tsang-wai-chung/