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 […]
Tag Archives: accent
Back in July 2020, in the introduction to the post ‘M is halfway‘, I invited you to suggest possible topics for posts N–Z. Colleague Daniel Barber took me at my word and suggested that for ‘X’ I should write about xenophobia. Happy just to be getting feedback, I said that I would. In hindsight, that […]
Variation, the way that speakers of the same language use it in often quite different ways, is a wholly natural, entirely unavoidable phenomenon. In fact, without variation languages wouldn’t actually serve their speakers’ needs. Living here in Northern Spain, what I need from Spanish is not the same as the needs of speakers in the […]
I was cleaning out old photos to reclaim a bit a space for my computer’s ailling memory when I came across this one from the 11th International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca, which was hosted at King’s College London back in July 2018. (So wish we could get back to that age of […]
Sorry about yesterday’s evasion of duties. It’s raining now, however, so let’s get down to business by first fleshing out the incidents and practices yesterday’s post dangled cryptically in front of you. First the flight to Moscow, where I’d got into a long conversation with a businessman who’d been born in East Germany, was bilingual […]
When I arrived in Spain back in 1981, I quickly became fascinated by one of my colleagues at the university. Born and raised in Birmingham, he had faultless Spanish, accent included. – Born in the UK? – Yes. – So he lived in Spain as a child? – No. – So has a Spanish mother? […]
There are various options for ‘E’, such as elision or epenthesis. However, since English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the thing put my comfortable little pronunciation teacher’s world totally on its head back in the late 1990s, the other ‘E’s will have to wait. I’ve written about ELF basics so many times that I’m […]
‘D’ could be for quite a lot of issues in pronunciation including dialect, diphthong or devoicing, but I thought I’d follow up from my post on bilabials with this one on dental consonants. There are two dental consonants in English, /θ/ and /ð/, as in thing and that, respectively. The two sounds are made in the same way, […]
The term ‘comprehensibility’ isn’t part of our everyday ELT vocabulary. We’re more used to talking about comprehension in terms of the questions accompanying a reading or listening text we are working on with our students. But ‘comprehensibility’ is a term used in pronunciation that is related to accent and also to intelligibility, and which, together […]
I ended my first post on accent by raising the question as to which accent we should use for teaching the pronunciation of English, so I guess that now I have to offer you some sort of answer. Here goes. (Shame on you all, by the way, for not putting anything in the comment box by […]
‘A’ is for accent. And given that accent is one of the core issues in pronunciation teaching, there is really no other place to start an alphabet-ordered pronunciation blog. Accent is what everyone has, what many learners tell teachers they want to lose, and what some unscrupulous commercial ventures claim they can ‘reduce’. (If you […]
Last Friday I was travelling home by train. As we approached the mountains that separate Asturias from the great plains of Central Spain, I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, who I’d seen using English in a message he’d been writing on his phone. He turned out to be an American […]
Take a look at this photo. It’s the first letter of a four-letter word. I saw it in the street in Madrid so it’s in Spanish. However, the word in question is spelt the same way in English. The question is, which letter is it? Now go to the bottom of this post and take a […]
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