Towards intelligibility: Designing short pronunciation courses for advanced field experts

International audienceEnglish teachers are frequently asked to help colleagues prepare presentations for international conferences. Sometimes this assistance takes the form of a language course or tutorials focusing on the spoken language. Contact time is short but the participants are highly motivated; therefore, which features of the spoken language should the teacher focus on? What type of pronunciation work will provide the greatest payoff in terms of successfully being understood when speaking English to an international audience? Given the current debate on norms, varieties and intelligibility - spurred on by the work of Jenkins (2000, 2002, 2007) and other proponents of English as a Lingua Franca - how can teachers ground their course design in research? This paper addresses a variety of issues concerning the design of pronunciation courses which focus on maximum intelligibility for both native and non-native speakers. Reference is made to an exploratory study of a particular course for researchers in applied linguistics, in order to illustrate some of the issues. Directions for further research are described

Comparing indicators of authorial stance in psychology students' writing and published research articles

The Journal of Writing Research is available via open access: http://jowr.org/ It is an international, on-line, peer reviewed journal.International audienceThis article presents the results of a pilot study examining the use of first-person pronouns, certain adjectives and grading adverbs in a corpus of 51 French psychology student papers written in English as a second language. These results were compared to a corpus of published psychology articles and to a sub-corpus of psychology student texts from the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). Strategic use of pairs of evaluative words was found in the students' texts but not in the published texts. However, the variables of native language and level of field expertise cannot explain all of the variance observed. Future work will improve the validity of the findings by using larger corpora of student and published texts

Jungle Listening: A course in decoding English for psychology students

Foreword Le principe d’isochronie qui régit le système rythmique de l’anglais est l’un des défis principaux de l’apprentissage de cette langue par les apprenants francophones : un système qui repose sur l’accentuation de syllabes à intervalles réguliers pose des défis considérables en production comme en compréhension pour des locuteurs ayant comme référence un système syllabique. Cet article rend compte d’une expérience pédagogique adoptant une approche originale de l’enseignement de la com..

Towards intelligibility: Designing short pronunciation courses for advanced field experts

Les enseignants d’anglais sont fréquemment appelés à aider leurs collègues à préparer des communications pour des colloques internationaux. Parfois, cette aide prend la forme de cours de langue, ou encore de séances individuelles, centrés sur l’oral. Si le temps d’échange est toujours restreint, les participants témoignent d’une grande motivation pour participer à ces travaux. Comment optimiser un travail axé sur la prononciation dans la perspective d’être compris en anglais par un auditoire international ? Face au débat actuel sur les normes et les variétés de l’anglais, impulsé par Jenkins (2000, 2002, 2007) et d’autres promoteurs de l’anglais en tant que Lingua Franca, comment mieux fonder ces pratiques pédagogiques ? Cette contribution traite de plusieurs questions concernant la conception d’un cours d’anglais parlé qui prend pour objectif une intelligibilité maximale auprès d’un public tant natif que non natif. Afin de traiter cette problématique, une étude préliminaire relative à un cours d'anglais ciblé sur un public de chercheurs en linguistique et en didactique est présentée. Des pistes pour des recherches ultérieures sont également proposées.English teachers are frequently asked to help colleagues prepare presentations for international conferences. Sometimes this assistance takes the form of a language course or tutorials focusing on the spoken language. Contact time is short but the participants are highly motivated. What type of pronunciation work will provide the greatest payoff in terms of successfully being understood when speaking English to an international audience? Given the current debate on norms and varieties – spurred on by the work of Jenkins (2000, 2002, 2007) and other proponents of English as a Lingua Franca – how can teachers ground their course design in research? This paper addresses a variety of issues concerning the design of pronunciation courses which focus on maximum intelligibility for both native speakers and non-native speakers. Reference is made to an exploratory study of a particular course for researchers in applied linguistics, in order to illustrate some of the issues. Directions for further research are described