An A–Z of pronunciation

Every cloud, supposedly, has a silver lining. I guess my COVID-19 silver lining is the time I have on my hands. That, and the fact that I’m at home and not in a hotel. So with time on my hands, I thought it was about time that I dug up an idea that has sat on the back burner for far too long.

Quite often when I’m giving courses on teaching pronunciation, I find that I have to backtrack in order to explain a term that I’m familiar with but that some of my group are not. I need a sort of glossary. One that I can give away at the beginning of the course, or even before the participants come to the first session. I need an A-Z of pronunciation.

Scott Thornbury will forgive me (I hope) for basing the concept of an A-Z of pronunciation on his excellent ‘An A-Z of ELT‘, but I want to try to emulate his idea and provide anyone interested in pronunciation with a similar sort of blog.

I’m not going to be so stupid as to attempt to provide definitive definitions about the terms I blog about – that’s way beyond what a single person can do, especially if I’m that single person. But I’ve been working on hard pronunciation these last few years, especially for Oxford University Press, English Teaching professional, and Modern English Teacher, and it seems to me that there are a lot of terms that need airing, some for the first time, perhaps, and others that need to be seen in a new light.

My idea is to go through the alphabet letter by letter, and while we’re all confined to our homes, I’m aiming to get a post out every twice a week. That’s a declaration of intention more than a statment of fact. Once we’re released back into the world, the frequency will most likely drop to once a week. I’ll be starting on Wednesday with the letter ‘A’. (Now there’s a surprise for you!).

To see what’s now been blogged. go to the menu bar on the top right of the page and hold your cursor over ‘An A–Z of Pronunciation’.

 

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