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: intelligibility
LIVESTREAM + SAMPLE CHAPTER People have been showing a lot of interest in Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World since its official launch on February 15th. This has been so exciting for Gemma and I as authors – pronunciation is all too often marginalised in ELT, or simply not done at all on the […]
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 […]
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 have a Word doc where I store ideas for future posts under the letters of the alphabet. Novel idea, eh! Not surprisingly, some letters look thinner than others (any ideas for Y other than yod?), and others could keep me going way past the end of even the worst pandemic. P, for example, could […]
In concluding ‘A’ is for accent (2), my second post in this pronunciation blog, I argued that ‘[a]ccent has given way to intelligibility as the main focus of pronunciation teaching in the 21st century’. A couple of weeks later, I ended the post on comprehensibility by tying accent and comprehensibility to a third term, intelligibility, […]
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 […]
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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