It’s so long since I last published anything on this blog (since the end of my A–Z of pronunciation, in fact), that I’ve more or less forgotten how to do it. But things have happened since I retired at the end of 2021 that seem to warrant one more sally into the world of blogging. […]
Tag Archives: international intelligibility
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
Over the past the past year I’ve put together a series of six articles for on pronunciation English Teaching professional, one of the world’s leading teacher’s magazines. The articles are relatively short. but cover a range of topics: Pronunciation Matters. ETp 90, January 2014. A look at the way that poor pronunciation impacts on every other […]
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 […]
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