This classroom research investigates the effectiveness of teaching reduced forms (e.g., "gonna" for "going to") for improving listening comprehension among EFL students in the People's Republic of China. A randomly selected experimental group (n = 16) received thirty lessons of approximately ten minutes each on reduced forms. This was part of their regular course work. At the same time a control group (n = 16) received "placebo" lessons of ten minutes on minimal pairs in pronunciation. Three measures of listening comprehension were used to pretest and posttest the students. The results indicate that teaching reduced forms does aid listening comprehension, but this is reflected to varying degrees in the three measures. The discussion explores causes for these differences, as well as solutions to some of the problems encountered in small classroom research.The literature over the last three decades contains only a handful of advocates of teaching reduced forms in the ESL classroom. Kingdon (1950) encourages the teaching of what he terms &dquo;weak forms&dquo; and attempts to classify and describe these forms grammatically by tabulating what he considers the 50 most common according to word class. He also includes phonetic transcriptions of each word in its various sentence environments and a few teaching suggestions. The classification seems less than comprehensive with only 38 selected function words and 12 miscellaneous ones (some of which are &dquo;Sir&dquo;, &dquo;Madam&dquo;, and &dquo;Saint&dquo;). However, this Kingdon article stands almost alone during the fifties except for two additional works of his own (1958a; 1958b). Bowen (1975) classifies, explains and illustrates informal speech: 1) reduction, or usually the dropping of strong vowels when a syllable is weak-stressed, 2) assimilation, or usually the changing of adjacent or nearby consonants to resemble each other, and 3) contraction, or specific sets of words where assimilations occur whenever specific sounds are brought together in sequence. Bowen's detailed description of each *This is a much revised version of a paper delivered at the TESOL Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii in 1982.
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