The last day of September saw me and a great many other teachers doing just what the event title says, and bridging the TESOL-SPAIN regions that come together in the north of Spain. Truth to tell, the bridges the one-day conference built were much bigger than I’d expected, with delegates arriving in Bilbao from places […]
Tag Archives: accents
Well, this is quite a mouthful of a name, so as this blog is always about pronunciation, let’s just refer to receptive competence, which is the listener’s ability to make sense of whatever it is that the other person is saying, or, to put it technically, to decode the incoming acoustic signal. Receptive competence, as […]
I was in Seville the other day, bound for Algeciras. The name brought back echoes of my childhood – on Sunday mornings in the 1960s the BBC had a radio programme where families could ask for music for loved ones who were serving abroad with the British Forces. Many of these servicemen and women were […]
I’m coming towards the end of a series of articles on the globalization of English, and ELF (English as a lingua franca). They’re being published in Modern English Teacher, and there are five already out there, plus one more to round the series off. The five that are out there are: The globalization of English: implications […]
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 […]
I recently received a very interesting email from someone doing their PhD on the teaching of pronunciation for English as a Lingua Franca. The person in question is researching at a Spanish university and hopes that their work will ‘help Spanish speakers of English improve their pronunciation in the language, following the Lingua Franca Core’. Obviously I […]
In the programme for the ACEIA conference I was speaking at last Saturday (a great conference if you’re ever in Seville in November), Umberto Eco was quoted as saying “The great danger of globalization is that it pushes us to [using] a common megalanguage“. Obviously Eco finds this unsettling, and if we see language as inextricably […]
Yesterday a colleague invited me to look at a video on the web site of the Guardian newspaper. We’ve been colleagues for a while now and she knows I’m really interested in everything to do with pronunciation, especially the non- standard pronunciation of non-native speakers. The clip I was going to watch, she warned me, […]
In my post of December 6 I drew attention to ELF Pronunciation, the blog that Katy Davies and Laura Patsko run. Both women are practising teachers in Dubia and London, respectively, where they work with multilingual classes. Many of the students in these classes use English in ELF contexts, i.e. for international communication usually in the […]
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