3. Reduced forms While spoken language does indeed contain a good deal of redundancy, it also has many reduced forms. Reduction can be phonological ("Djeetyet?" for "Did you eat yet?"), morphological (contractions like "I'll), syntactic (elliptical forms like "When will you be back?" "Tomorrow, maybe."), or pragmatic (Phone rings in a house, child answers, cups the telephone and yells to another room in the house, "Mom! Phone!"). These reductions pose significant
difficulties especially to classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.
4. Performance variables In spoken language, except for planned discourse (speeches, lectures, etc.), hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections are common. Native listeners are conditioned from very young ages to "weed out" such performance variables whereas they can easily interfere with comprehension in second language learners. Imagine listening to the following verbatim excerpt of a sportsman talking about his game:
But, uh—I also—to go with this of course if you're playing well—if you're playing well then you get uptight about your game. You get keyed up and it's easy to concentrate. You know you're playing well and you know... in with a chance then it's easier, much easier to—to you know get in there and—and start to... you don't have to think about it. I mean it's gotta be automatic.
In written form this looks like gibberish but it's the kind of language we hear and process all the time. Learners have to train themselves to listen for the meaning in the midst of all these distracting performance variables.
5. Colloquial language Learners who have been exposed to standard written English and/or "textbook" language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language. Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point in conversations. Colloquialisms appear in both monologues and dialogues.