Status Updates From Breaking the Sound Barrier:...

There are important individual differences which depend on how good one's 'phonological rehersal ability' is...accomplished multilinguals have superior memory abilities with respect to the 'phonological loop' - which consists of a phonological store (an inner ear) and an articulatory loop (an inner voice). We use the phonological loop when we subvocalise, e.g. repeating a telephone number to better remember it.

"Research has shown that making use of formulaic expressions and memorising lengthy chucks of text (and making substititions is far more efficient than learning new linguistic strings from individual words" - sorry, Chomsky.

What 'knowing' a word actually means - it's spelling, pronunciation, morphological forms, meaning(s) in different contexts, it's synonyms and antonyms, correct usage, collocations, and register. - we never really actually learn a word, we just learn more and mopre about a word, a lot of what we learn remains unconscious.

"Transfer Appropriate Processing - we tend to recall words in the form we encountered them . This is particulary the case for French and English where the spelling-phoneme correspondence is low" - should be less of a problem for learners of Hungarian.

Draw a grid - use a hidden crossword instead of hidden figures, and you intensify their use of the alphabet.

Spot the mistakes and correct - still trying to find a way to get my students to actively listen to songs using OneNote, could this be it?

Track the pitch - I should know more about pitch and tone groups before I try to use this.

Critical listening - this is as they says elaborate; how do imagine that 16 kids in class room trying to listen to individual recordings will play out? But it seems a very useful exercise. Might try in on myself reading Hungarian.

Letters on the board - looks like a good exercise to help Hungarians to spell in English

"...knowing the the acceptable sounds which can appear together and at the starts and ends of words helps people decode speech. This is known in the literature as phonotactics..." - how does this interact with sound recognition: is sound recognition prior to phototactic knowledge, or does phototactic knowledge help resolve ambiguities in sound recognition?

"...it takes lots or receptive practice through recycling, spaced practice and interleaving before skills become internalised. De Jong (2005) notes that if students have to produce too soon they fall back on incorrect or incomplete knowledge, or on knowledge of sounds in their L1" - students that suddenly start speaking after years of passivity, am I one of those?

"Research has shown that, while listening, we cannot focus on both meaning and form of the language at the same time" - how did the researchers separate meaning from form?

"Whole lessons or more can be spent on LAM and RAM (Reading-as-modelling) before free production is attempted. When time is limited it can be tempting to go from presentation straight to production without enough time for students to process large amounts of comprehensible input" - smash the tyranny of the stand alone lesson based plan!

"Another factor which affects comprehension is the pace of delivery." - intuitively, I agree with this, though I think the gaps in the delivery are more signifigant that the speed of delivery. With a gap I find can catch up with what has been said. But is there any evidence for this?

"With high-attaining students this figure may fall to around 90%" - i.e. clever sausages can cope with 1 unfamiliar word in 10.

Listening-as-modelling = Explicit modelling (by teacher) + implicit modelling (by student) + micro-skills + cognative strategies

"...any input which contains fewer than 95-98% comprehensible words poses serious obstacles to understanding, and consequently learning." - i.e more than 1 in 20 - 1 in 50 incomprehendible words, the second figure seems low.