Programme
Conference programme - version from May 21, 2015
Invited speakers
in alphabetical order
Mark Hancock - author of excellent books on English pronunciation
Beatrice Szczepek Reed - teacher and researcher at University of York
Ewa Waniek-Klimczak - teacher and researcher at University of Lodz
Abstracts
Mark Hancock
Doing things with sounds: practical pronunciation activities for ELT classrooms
In this talk, we'll be looking at individual sounds and things we and our students can do with them. These will include:
- Experimenting: simple classroom techniques to make students aware of sound articulation
- Imagining: imagery and movements to show students how sounds are produced
- Representing: using phonemic symbols to represent sounds
- Exploring: using a chart to explore the sound systems
- Playing: using word play to help students notice and practice sounds
- Communicating: using tasks which require students to understand and produce sounds
Beatrice Szczepek Reed
Pronunciation and the accomplishment of social actions: Insights from Conversation Analysis
The aim of this talk is to go beyond the intelligibility debate and to suggest the need to consider the role of phonetics and prosody for natural interaction.
Findings from empirical research show how vitally influential pronunciation is in terms of communicating, for example, turn taking, alignment with others, and sequential breaks or continuations.
While it is not necessary for learners to use native-like pronunciation, learning to accomplish conversational actions is a crucial social skill and thus an important learning goal.
The talk will show that learners who use non-standard pronunciation can be successful participants in talk-in-interaction.
The presentation will discuss the complexities of pronunciation in interaction, as well as a way of incorporating some of them into a teaching approach.
Ewa Waniek-Klimczak
Accents in learners of English: Problems, challenges, (possible) solutions
Whether considered from the perspective of a target/model variety or characteristics of learner pronunciation, English accents continue to attract attention of English learners and teachers. The aim of this talk is to discuss accents with reference to both of the above meanings, concentrating on problems related to the choice of the model/target variety and its function, the status and description of learner Englishes, major challenges that the problems create for specifying the aims and priorities in pronunciation instruction, and finally, possible solutions.
Throughout the talk, learners will have a voice - after all, the speaker herself belongs in that number.
