Chapter 19 opens by asking readers to reflect on prior collaborations, writing down their views on what makes people easy to work with and what makes them hard to work with. The chapter argues for a team-based approach to public engagement, and suggests ways to build effective teams. Also, it’s important to trust our partners at informal learning venues, as they have expertise on the audiences and logistics in these settings. Emphasizing that communication with these partners is still a conversation, the chapter returns to the principles of a successful conversation described in Chapter 3 and unpacks each one with reference to venue partners. A case study exemplifies these points, describing a partnership between university students and faculty and museum professionals. Details are given of negotiation about institutional missions and daily operations through to a demonstration on children’s science practices in a game about vowel sounds. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to make a detailed plan for getting their demonstration into a specific place or event.

Chapter 10 opens by asking readers to choose two kinds of people they might encounter in informal learning settings and to identify questions those people might have about their general topic and about their specific activity. Returning to the fact that a successful conversation is cooperative, this chapter emphasizes asking questions and listening. Asking questions of an audience gives the expert substantive information to listen to. Sets of questions give people choice, and the sets can include questions about explanations of the phenomena being shown. A "juicy question," for example, is one that nonexperts can address by using the materials/examples at hand – in effect, encouraging scientific reasoning. Giving people time to answer questions and then listening carefully as they do so shows respect, as does asking new questions that reflect people’s earlier responses. Readers are cautioned to avoid testing their audience or to feel that they themselves are being tested. The Worked Example finds juicy questions in a map-based demonstration of variation in regional dialects.

Emphasizing other people’s perspectives on the demonstrations that readers are developing, Chapter 7 opens by asking readers to imagine specific people who they might encounter in an informal learning setting and to reflect on why those people might care about their topic area and what they might already know about it. The chapter then reviews several examples of connections between language and broader, real-world experiences that many people are likely to have had. One of the advertising examples uses Bounty’s "quicker picker upper" phrase to show morphological processes. One of the cell phone examples uses mistakes in automatic speech recognition to show sociolinguistic comparisons across accents and genders. One of the popular song examples uses mondegreens (or misperceptions of lyrics such as Taylor Swift’s "lonely Starbucks lovers") to show phonotactic regularities. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down specific ways that people might encounter their demonstration’s central topic in everyday life.

Each of the individuals considered in the book had a different relationship to landscape. This reflected the varying circumstances, situations, events and influences (including cultural influences) that shaped their lives. Despite these contrasts, it is possible to identify four broad groupings. Adherers like Hallam and Cresswell were motivated by a passionate need to maintain their connection with a cherished past. Rural landscapes associated with this past served as a guarantee of its continuity. Withdrawers such as Dickinson and Spear Smith sought to escape from an oppressive present, be that family tensions and social prejudice as in Dickinson’s case, or Spear Smith’s vocational difficulties. Restorers turned to the countryside as a place in which they could reconnect with and re-energize belief systems that had been challenged, disrupted or pushed aside by personal exigencies or professional demands – medical practice for Johnston and probation work for Bissell. Finally, Explorers like Barmes and Catley valued rural landscapes above all as sites of self-discovery and self-development.

This chapter focuses on how Bolaño’s short novel Amulet (1998) approaches the tumultuous period of Mexico 1968, with its effervescent student movement and the subsequent violent governmental repression that led to the military occupation of the country’s most important university, UNAM, as well as the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd. Through the narration of Auxilio, an Uruguayan poet who remained locked in a women’s bathroom at UNAM during the two week span of the university’s occupation, the novel reconstructs this period yet shies away from a linear, chronological narration with a transparent claim to truth. On the contrary, by intertwining historical facts with fiction, Amulet’s unreliable and anachronistic narrator works against closure, embracing political defeat as a means to propose listening as a form of continued engagement.

Chapter 5 examines Herbert’s attendance at the public choral liturgies of the church. Herbert was associated throughout his life with religious institutions that supported choral foundations: Westminster Abbey, Trinity College, Cambridge, Lincoln Cathedral, and, most famously, Salisbury Cathedral. Herbert’s practical interest in making music is well known; yet he was never a member of these choirs, and the music performed during public worship at these foundations is a repertoire that he would have experienced passively and aurally. This chapter reads Herbert’s poetic alongside contemporary developments in the composition and aesthetics of seventeenth-century liturgical choral music. In revealing striking analogues between Herbert’s verse and contemporary polyphonic church music, this chapter considers Herbert and his work in more receptive, attentive terms, affording significant new perspectives on the nature of devotional attention and early modern debates about the ‘beauty of holiness’ and the aesthetics of worship.

The importance of Herbert’s musico-poetic activities for an understanding of his devotional verse is summarised, transforming our reading of his verse and challenging us to think beyond a silent encounter with the written page. At the heart of Herbert’s music lies the tension of paradox: between abstract ideal and the imperfect reality of the world; between simple expression and more elaborate, ornamented modes; between the evanescent temporality of earthly existence and the eternity of God’s time. In conclusion, the Epilogue turns to the work of Herbert’s twentieth-century reader Simone Weil, who like Herbert recognises the paradoxical tension of music, what she calls ‘Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries’.

Learning vocabulary through listening is one type of learning through meaning-focused input. Learners need at least 95 per cent coverage of the running words (around 3,000 word families) in the informal spoken input in order to gain reasonable comprehension and to have reasonable success at guessing unknown vocabulary from context clues. A well-balanced listening and speaking course includes opportunities to learn through listening to monologues and interactive communication, opportunities to learn from speaking and interacting with others, the deliberate study of pronunciation, vocabulary and multiword units, and grammar, and opportunities to become fluent in listening and speaking. This chapter includes a large range of activities to provide these opportunities, and describes how teachers can design speaking activities so that vocabulary is more likely to be learned. The research shows that those who observe speaking activities are just as likely to learn the vocabulary in the activities as those who actively participate

This chapter explores Britten’s investment in composing for young people – the most obvious outworking of his well-known belief that the composer had a ‘duty to society’. It positions this part of his oeuvre within the context of a number of interconnected contemporary critical debates: about national education reform; about the supposed impact of sound reproduction technologies on the public’s listening habits; about the arts’ imagined capacity to nurture ‘responsible citizens’; and about the contested consequences of industrialisation for local culture and community. It then examines two different ways in which Britten responded to cultural critics’ concerns about the socially alienating conditions of modern life: whereas Noye’s Fludde sought to foster community through promoting amateur performance, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra encouraged a different kind of cultural participation premised on ‘active’ listening. More broadly, these compositions reveal how arts education became a vehicle for debating, making sense of, and regulating the social changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

Many children seem to learn to talk effortlessly, perhaps because they are treated as meaning-makers from the moment they are born. As Alexander writes, talk plays a powerful role in a child’s learning and yet, sometimes once a child can talk, we pay little attention to the ongoing development of speaking and active listening. This chapter begins by focusing on how children become competent oral communicators in the home, in early childhood contexts and at school. The central role of storying and storytelling in learning both language and culture, including the role of oral narrative in Australia’s First Nations cultures, is also considered in helping us understand why oracy underpins learning to read and write. This chapter documents how speaking and listening are represented in both the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the Australian Curriculum: English. Finally, a range of teaching and learning instructional strategies that foster the ongoing development of children’s speaking and listening are explored.

The Conclusion demonstrates how the tradition of thinking in terms of rhetorical relationships can illuminate a new problem – in this case, partisan polarization in the United States. The contemporary discourse around polarization casts it as a breakdown in the possibilities of persuasion. For the dominant accounts, the root causes of our polarized politics lie in human psychology and our evolutionary legacy, and to the extent that a solution is possible, it must involve a sweeping program of moral reform. By contrast, an approach grounded in rhetorical relationships would see the polarized citizen as engaged in a deficient, but self-protective, form of listening. Crucially, this listening is the counterpart of the algorithmic and demagogic rhetoric I discussed in the Introduction – deficient, but self-protective, forms of speaking. Just as speakers engaged in those rhetorical pathologies withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on speech, polarized citizens withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on listening. Just as those pathologies result from an excess of elite risk-aversion, polarized listening is self-defense against the risks and rigors of persuadability. Political “tribalism” is a justifiable response to a broken rhetorical bargain, a refusal to bear the burdens of persuadability under conditions of unmitigated political inequality.

This chapter introduces an evidence-based model for personal change called BET I CAN. BET I CAN stands for Behaviors, Emotions, Thoughts, Interactions, Context, Awareness, and Next steps. When it comes to mattering, you can easily see that it involves all the BET I CAN levers. For instance, we can add value by doing something (behaviors), relating to people in certain ways (interactions), and shaping the community where we live (context). In turn, we can feel valued through emotions or thoughts. Our plans to add value, or feel valued, as the case may be, always require awareness of our situation and next steps. Each letter of the BET I CAN model encompassed two skills. This is what we teach in the chapter: Behaviors (Set a Goal and Create a Positive Habits), Emotions (Cultivate Positive Emotions and Manage Negative Emotions), Thoughts (Challenge Negative Assumptions and Write a New Story), Interactions (Connect and Communicate), Context (Read the Cues and Change the Cues), Awareness (Know Yourself and Know the Issue), and Next Steps (Make a Plan and Make it Stick).

To matter in relationships is to feel valued and to add value. Strong bonds enable us to feel loved, appreciated, recognized, and affirmed. This is the first part of the equation. The second part is helping one another add value to the relationship and the world. In this chapter we focus on the bonds we have with people close to us: family, friends, and fellow workers. If you want to experience mattering in a relationship it is essential to express, and not just think, positive things about your loved ones. If you want to matter in the inner circle you don’t have to avoid conflict – you just have to know how to handle it. Healthy relationships are characterized by effective management of conflict, not by the avoidance of it, as it is all but inevitable. Many people stay away from conflict because they think that it is the end of the world. They close up, shut down, and avoid addressing the conflict, leaving neither party satisfied. But well-managed conflict can lead to intrapersonal and interpersonal growth and to a stronger relational bond.

This study was designed to investigate the contribution of non-native (L2) patterns of pausing to the perceived effort of listening to speech. English-language speech samples from ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese (five of each) previously assessed as having intermediate proficiency in English were manipulated by removing all non-juncture silent pauses as well as all filled pauses. The original and manipulated speech samples, as well as samples of comparable but un-manipulated English speech produced by ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese with higher English proficiency were evaluated in a between-groups design by 60 native speakers of American English. Although the removal of non-juncture pauses did not significantly alter listeners’ ratings of the intermediate speech, results did suggest a subtle interaction between ratings of effort and measures of listeners’ working memory capacity, suggesting that the detrimental effects of pausing in non-native accented speech may be related to increased demand on limited-capacity cognitive processing resources such as working memory.

It has been suggested that co-textual and contextual cues do not contribute much to phonological intelligibility in ELF interactions, since many non-native ELF users seem largely unable to draw on such cues when processing each other’s accents (Jenkins 2000). This small-scale, qualitative study investigates the role played by co-textual and contextual information in instances of phonological unintelligibility in ELF interactions. The results suggest that the non-native ELF users in this study tend to ‘interpret’ rather than ‘decode’ the incoming acoustic signal in relation to co-textual and contextual cues, provided they are available. The findings also indicate that such cues are not always beneficial to the listener, as they can also ‘mislead’ them by supporting an incorrect identification of a word.