In 2001, the speaker discussed English pronunciation at the TESOL-SPAIN Annual Convention. This addressed the conflicting goals of native-speaker accent and international intelligibility. The recent talk in Cáceres concluded this 20-year journey, emphasizing that these goals are not mutually exclusive. The speaker, now semi-retired, also marked the end of their ELT career in Spain.
Tag Archives: ELF
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 […]
W I made it! Finally got to ‘W’ and so can talk about something really important. Weak forms. A central feature of spoken English. Crucial to getting the rhythm right. Something we can all wax lyrical about! (If you’re sitting there panicking because you can’t quite remember what weak forms are, don’t worry. Memory is […]
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 […]
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 […]
The City Hall (Ayuntamiento) in Madrid has a banner stretched across its imposing facade. There was a lot of criticism of the Mayor when this banner went up because of how much it had cost (around 450€), and perhaps because of who the Mayor is. But the money hasn’t been wasted as the banner has […]
Those of you who follow me (both of you!) know that I blog on a highly irregular basis. I last blogged, in fact, back in July (summer is great for switching off), and wrote then about whether or not to correct learner English, especially if it is publically displayed. Staying with the same theme, I came […]
In this second post about doubts about ELF pronunciation I want to respond to two questions about weak forms: 1. … regarding the use of weak forms, the LFC states that they are not to be taught (unless the student’s needs are for EFL) so speakers are encouraged to use the strong form of the word. In […]
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, […]
International flights are a great opportunity to see English working as a lingua franca. When you take off from Zurich to Madrid as I did the other day, the safety demonstration and other standard messages that you get over the speakers are not aimed at native speakers, and usually aren’t given by native speakers. It was interesting […]
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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