Elision and the English Language

Foreign speakers of the English language are faced with quite a daunting task when it comes to navigating silent letters, words that have no phonetic properties and other unusual nuances; when met with elisions ("gonna" instead of "going to," "wanna" instead of "want to" and "innit" instead of "isn't it"), their comprehension declines with the inability to grasp abbreviated speech. Mastering any language is about learning the words; however, when standard terms take on idiomatic expressions specific only to local tongues, foreign speakers are left at a significant disadvantage trying to decipher what is truly being said.

Those with little experience of listening, but who have had considerable experience of reading and writing, frequently fail to connect the sounds they hear with the words they have seen and recognized in their printed form, and find the whole experience confusing and discouraging (Underwood).

According to Brown in Listening to Spoken English, elision is the "'missing out' of a consonant or vowel, or both, that would be present in the slow colloquial pronunciation of a word in isolation." The extent to which these informal speech characteristics occur has rendered the English language even more difficult for foreigners to grasp, and one of the main reasons why foreign-born populations do not pursue it much beyond the basic level.

Instructors are encouraged to address this aspect when teaching students; however, it's not always clear which elisions should be taught. There is already a tremendous curve to learning the English language with so many illogical and inconsistent rules; adding to it the lazy, nonsensical jargon of elision makes the quest to assimilate that much more difficult.