SPLIS Webinar: Teaching Pronunciation in World Englishes Context: Prosody Matters

Webinar hosted by the TESOL Speech, Pronunciation, and Listening Interest Section

This webinar begins by positioning the discussion of pronunciation instruction in the context of World Englishes within the historical debate of nativism and intelligibility paradigm, focusing on what pronunciation features are important for mutual intelligibility. Particularly, the discussion will address suprasegmental features, which are marginalized in ESL classrooms and largely excluded as core features in the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2000). Backed by current research on the role of suprasegmental features on listeners’ perceptual judgments of speakers from different L1 backgrounds (e.g., Huang, 2019), this webinar discusses prosodic features important for mutual intelligibility, such as sentence stress, pauses, and intonation. Also, this webinar will provide teaching tips for teaching suprasegmental features in an EFL language classroom.

[xinyuzhangchristina]

Pronunciation is essential for English Language Learners to acquire the language because it serves as the foundation of the learning progress. The teaching strategies and resources shared in this video are really helpful. Thank you for sharing.