Speech in Action
Speech in Action is a Birmingham-based independent ELT publisher and consultancy founded in 2001 by Richard Cauldwell after he left the English department at the University of Birmingham. Its catalogue is small, tightly focused, and entirely organised around a single claim: L2 learners fail at listening not because of slow processing or weak vocabulary, but because classroom materials train them on speech that does not exist outside the classroom.
The house pedagogy treats connected speech as a gradient from Greenhouse English (citation forms) through Garden English (textbook connected speech) to Jungle English (radically reduced spontaneous talk), and argues that Decoding the jungle needs its own syllabus, its own recordings, and its own drills. That frame has given the field a vocabulary for teaching bottom-up listening to real speech rather than to carefully enunciated classroom speech, and it sits behind most contemporary calls for a process approach to listening.
Publications
- Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English (2002, CD-ROM; later web materials)
- Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech (2013)
- Cool Speech: Hot Listening, Cool Pronunciation (2013, iPad app, with Firsty)
- A Syllabus for Listening: Decoding (2018)
Awards
- British Council ELTon for Innovation, 2004, for Streaming Speech
- British Council ELTons Digital Innovation, 2013, for Cool Speech
References
- Speech in Action, "About" — speechinaction.org/speech-in-action/about (now redirecting; archived copies remain)
- FirstyNews interview, "Richard Cauldwell, teacher-trainer and founder of Speech in Action"
- British Council, "ELTons 2013 winners"
- Setter, J. (2014). Review of Phonology for Listening. TESOL Quarterly 48(4)
- Sakai, N. (2019). Review of A Syllabus for Listening: Decoding. Journal of the International Phonetic Association