Mark Hancock

Many teachers worry about what the best model accent should be, and whether their own accent serves as a suitable model. My argument is that the premise of the question is wrong – there needn’t be a single model accent, and that the teacher’s own accent will usually be the best model, providing that the teacher is an intelligible speaker of English.

English Pronunciation in Use gets a new look this month. The new cover design comes along with a new approach to audio - instead of being on a set of 5 CDs (which were expensive), the audio is now a free online download. Makes the whole package much more affordable.

Peter Medgyes brought to TESOL Spain a quirky plenary which somehow managed to be poetic, theatrical and intellectual at the same time. The performance amused and enchanted the audience, myself included – I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it left some puzzled as to what it was about. As one teacher commented to me, ‘What is ELF, and why is it important?’.

TESOL Spain 2017 finished up with a compelling plenary from Silvana Richardson on native-speakerism and bias in ELT. She covered the topic from many angles, but out of all of them, I would just like to focus on one – the use of the phrase “native-speaker teachers” as a pull-factor in advertising language courses. Why has this come to be seen as a good thing - if indeed it has been?

In speaking styles, there is a continuum between mumbling and rolling your ‘r’s –. What I mean by mumbling here is speaking with as little mouth movement as possible in order to minimize effort on the part of the speaker.

"My sister went out with a long jumper". Here's a claim with two meanings, and reading it, you'd never be sure which was intended. But hearing it would clarify things, because the speaker has a way of communicating the intended meaning. It's the vocal effort known as 'stress'. "Long jumper" (athlete) is two words acting as a single lexical item.

In a language where "What's your address?" can become a homophone of "Watch or a dress?", there's plenty of scope for misunderstanding, even for what you might call 'native listeners'. For learner listeners, the situation is many times more perilous. For them, listening can be like wandering in a surreal soundscape.