Richard Cauldwell
Cauldwell
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.
Career
- Taught English in France, Hong Kong, Japan, and the UK before moving into UK higher education
- Joined the English department at the University of Birmingham in 1990 and worked alongside David Brazil on discourse intonation
- Founded Speech in Action in 2001 as an independent publisher and consultancy
- Two British Council ELTons: 2004 for Streaming Speech, 2013 for Cool Speech
Published Work
- Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English (2002; revised edition 2018), originally released as CD-ROM and web materials
- Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech (Speech in Action, 2013)
- A Syllabus for Listening: Decoding (Speech in Action, 2018)
Influence
- Gave the field the greenhouse-garden-jungle metaphor, separating citation speech (greenhouse), careful conversational speech (garden), and fast spontaneous speech (jungle) so teachers can target the jungle directly instead of drilling greenhouse forms
- Made the case that bottom-up decoding of reduced, blurred, connected speech is teachable and has to come before top-down compensation can be reliable
- Shares theoretical ground with Field's process-oriented listening pedagogy and extends the tradition traceable to Brown and Yule's early work on teaching the spoken language
- His Window on the Classroom observations have pushed materials writers toward corpus-based, unscripted audio