Mark Hancock

We often think of pronunciation in terms of productive skills, but it’s equally important for receptive ones. Indeed, some aspects of pronunciation learning are primarily for the benefit of listening – connected speech in particular.

In this class, we will address three big questions in pronunciation teaching:
A. Why are we teaching it? We will consider how the needs of learners very according to context, and how this affects what we teach. We will differentiate pronunciation for productive and for receptive purposes.

Many of us who are in the business of teaching English suffer from a feeling of accent anxiety. We are embarrassed that our accent does not match the ideal ‘standard’ accent found in books and dictionaries, and we worry that our speech may not be a good pronunciation model for our students. But perhaps our worries are misguided.