Richard Cauldwell is a British phonologist and teacher trainer, founder of the Birmingham-based publisher and consultancy Speech in Action, and the ELT field's most insistent voice on the teachability of bottom-up decoding for L2 listeners. After teaching in France, Hong Kong, and Japan, he joined the English department at the University of Birmingham in 1990, studied discourse intonation under David Brazil, and left in 2001 to run Speech in Action full-time.
His core argument is that classroom listening materials train learners on speech that does not exist in the wild, and that real spontaneous speech has to be decoded, not merely guessed at from context.