Think Like a Lip Reader

Think like a lip reader – with Great Expectations.This book will not turn you into a lip reader – if you haven’t yet begun to learn to lip read, this is not the book for you. You should start at the beginning and either, join a lip reading class, or use the companion book “Lip Reading – a self-help textbook”.If you have already begun to learn to lip read, this book may well be of help to you. Its purpose is to get you into the habit of thinking like a lip reader. It does not contain any lip reading teaching but simply uses the special texts that are introduced and described in the self-help textbook.There are two important things the lip reader needs to bear in mind at all times: – The first of these is that lip reading is about the way language sounds not about the way it is spelled. Phonetic text is designed to help you to think in this way.The second is that lip reading is ambiguous. It is plagued with alternative interpretations many of which are obviously incorrect but many also are quite plausible. Lip spelled text is a kind of halfway house, on the way towards lip reading, where you are able to practise dealing with the ambiguity without having at the same time to recognise the lip shapes.The story being told in the text comes from part 1 of the nineteenth century novel “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens. It is broken down into small units of about one paragraph. The original text and its translations into phonetic and lip shape texts are grouped together for ease of comparison and each text is on different coloured background for ease of identification.