Please join us for the next Centre for Global Englishes (CGE) seminar on Wednesday 5 March at 5:00 PM (Avenue Campus, Lecture Theatre C).

The invited speaker is David Deterding, University of Brunei Darussalam. The topic of his talk is ‘Intelligibility and Misunderstanding in ELF’

Abstract

After a brief consideration of norms in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), I will consider some features of ELF pronunciation which seem to enhance the intelligibility of the language in an international setting, specifically the avoidance of vowel reduction and the use of [t] for voiceless TH. Then I will discuss my work on misunderstandings, describing how the data was collected, how it was analysed, and the results that emerged. I will focus particularly on the features of pronunciation that caused misunderstandings to occur and how they fit in with ELF-based teaching, particularly what they tell us about the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), the set of pronunciation features that are suggested to be essential for maintaining intelligibility in an international setting. Finally, I will reflect on the problems that a researcher faces when collecting and analysing data on misunderstandings in ELF, how these might be dealt with, and also the issues that are raised for teaching the pronunciation of English.