IATEFL Webinar: Four principles for accent-friendly pronunciation teaching

Register here. English is an international language, but for pronunciation we are often given only national choices – US or UK. Worse still, only the ‘standard’ accents of these countries are seen as acceptable. This limitation is not necessary - in global communication, people with a wide variety of accents, both native and non-native, are able to understand and make themselves understood perfectly well. Intelligibility does not depend on having a standard accent. In this presentation, I will suggest that it is possible to teach pronunciation in a way which is more flexible and accepting of different accents. The presentation will be organised around four principles for accent-friendly pronunciation teaching:
1 ‘Effective’ beats ‘correct’
2 If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it
3 Make the difference you need
4 Speak locally, hear globally
I will explain each of these principles in turn, and then go on to give simple and practical suggestions for putting them into practice in your classroom. For more details about this accent-friendly approach to teaching pronunciation, see Section A of PronPack: The Minimal Pair Collection.