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: Teaching English as a Lingua Franca
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 […]
When I posted at the beginning of January about the book that Gemma Archer and I have written on pronunciation, quite a lot of people asked when it was due out. Gemma and I had our advance copies but the book wasn’t yet on sale so I promised I’d let people know when they were […]
What an exciting way to start 2024. Hot off the presses, Gemma Archer and I have just received our author’s copies of our new book, Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World. The book is part of the Oxford University Press series ‘Into the Classroom’, and is the teacher-oriented follow up to the OUP Position […]
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 […]
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. […]
This should have been the easiest post so far – after all, I do know a thing or two about the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) – but it’s been driving me crazy for days. The problem is you. Who are you? What do you already know about the LFC? And what don’t you know? So […]
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, […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
englishglobalcom 