English Phonetics: Elevate Your Speaking Skills

This five-part training series covers advanced speaking skills to improve your academic presentations for international audiences. Our focus will be on vocal factors that research indicates can impact the ability to convey our message effectively: intonation, stress and vowel length. These key phonetic features help multilingual presenters communicate effectively with globally and linguistically diverse colleagues.

In an increasingly interconnected world, we succeed by communicating effectively with each other as humans with diverse language backgrounds. In many academic spaces, English has become the default language. Regardless of how many other languages we speak, we are often expected to communicate in English as a lingua franca – or shared language – in academic and professional settings. The stronger our English communication skills, therefore, the greater our advantage in finding international recognition.

Our goal here is not to sound like a native speaker or reduce an accent. The goal for each of these videos is to be understood by global audiences - and to sound like yourself.

In these 5 video lessons, we will learn important speaking skills for being understood on a global stage. I recommend watching the videos in order from 1-5 as each lesson builds on skills taught in the previous video.

Happy learning!

References:

Belcher, D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 1–22.

Belcher, D. (2009) How research space is created in a diverse research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(4), 221–234.

Jenkins, Jennifer (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language: New Models, New Norms, New Goals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 6 Pedagogic priorities 1: Identifying the phonological core, pp 123-163.

Salager-Meyer, F. (2008) Scientific publishing in developing countries: Challenges for the future Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7, 121-132

Salager-Meyer, F. (2014) Writing and publishing in peripheral scholarly journals: How to enhance the global influence of multilingual scholars? Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 13, 78–82.

Wennerstrom, Ann (2018). Intonation and language learning. In Okim Kang, Ron Thomson, & John M. Murphy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary English Pronunciation. Routledge, 154-168.

Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2013). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell.