2012 ATESOL ACT Professional Development Workshop. Marnie Reed, Boston University, USA: tesol@bu.edu Pronunciation Tools for Fostering Intelligibility and Communication Success Marnie Reed, Boston University This workshop will guide us through the world of suprasegmental features of pronunciation, look at some ways to help our students learn to hear and use intonation & contrastive stress to provide them with access to a greater range of English communication. We will examine practical ways to integrate pronunciation into lessons within a broader framework of current research and latest practices Clarifying the Terms / Establishing our Goals 1. _____ accent a. rhythm, intonation (nuclear placement, pitch height, nuclear accent mobility) stress, and syllable length (Gilbert, 1993; Celce‐Murcia, 1987; Dalton & Seidlhofer, 1994) 2. _____ comprehensibility b. " the apprehension of the message in the sense intended by the speaker" (Nelson, 1982) 3. _____ intelligibility c. the result of a combination of four features— grammatical and phonemic errors, prosody, and speaking rate (Derwing & Munro, 1997) 4. _____ prosody d. individual vowels and consonants (Derwing, Munro & Weibe, 1998) 5. _____ segmentals e. the extent to which the native speaker understands the intended message (Munro & Derwing, 1995) 6. _____ suprasegmentals f. judgments on a rating scale of how difficult or easy an utterance is to understand (Derwing & Munro, 1997) Some Issues to be Addressed: What do we teach? Establishing the Scope of the Task of Teaching Pronunciation Should we teach it? The Ethics of Teaching Pronunciation Recent & current demands on teaching in a global context Intelligibility training, not foreign accent reduction Can we teach it? The mechanics of Teaching Pronunciation Finding the right balance: segmentals - suprasegmentals Prioritizing diverse features of pronunciation Which segmentals? Why suprasegmentals? Does it work? The Efficacy of Teaching Pronunciation What makes it work: necessary & sufficient conditions