Z – the end of the road

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Z. The end of the alphabet and the end of this ‘A–Z of pronunciation‘ blog. There’s a lot more to say, of course, and a lot that could be dealt with in greater depth, but the blog has handsomely fulfilled it’s initial purpose, which was to give my life some sort of structure and direction during the lockdowns we’ve had here since March 2020.

For the moment, thankfully, lockdown is behind us; the State of Emergency came to an end on May 9th in Spain, and the long summer days around the corner are not propitious for sitting at home for three or four hours a week to put together a meaningful post.

What did I not cover that was on my initial list back in April 2020? Quite a lot – allophones, assimilation, alveolars, approximants, blade, back, catenation, central, close, coalescence … The list goes on ….

Missing content aside, however, over the past year I have managed to blog about a good few different aspects of the complex business of teaching the pronunciation of English in a world where it is now a global language. In doing so, I hope I’ve helped fill in the gaps in your knowledge where there were any, and got you to reflect on a teaching skill that for some of us at least, has moved on from previous native-speaker oriented practices.

To bring the blog to a close, then, here is an alphabetical list of the topics I explored, and after each topic title, a list of the most relevant posts for anyone interested that topic. I hope you find this useful, and even more, that you pass on the link to this page to colleagues everywhere in the world so that they can benefit from what’s here.

Last of all, if you have an individual comment or question and you don’t want to go public via the comment box at the bottom of this post, then write to me by email at robin@englishglobalcom.com. I might not get back to you the same day, but I will get back to you.

Accent

Bilabials

Comprehensibility

Dental consonants

ELF

Fricatives

Goals

Habit formation

Intelligibility

Jennifer Jenkins

Kenworthy, J.

Lingua Franca Core

Models

Monolingual groups

Mother tongue interference

Priorities

Pronunciation and spelling

Receptive phonological competence

Schwa

Stress timing

Tonic stress

Variation

Vowels

Weak forms

X

Y

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