Customer Reviews

The Phonology of English as an International Language (Oxford Applied Linguistics)

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This is an indispensable and insightful book that uses groundbreaking research to address how the changing roles of English in the world affect language teachers' decisions to teach pronunciation. The book argues that, for most users of English in the world, neither achieving a native speaker accent nor having an accent that is understandable to a native speaker is an appropriate goal. Because most users of English do not speak with native speakers, Jenkins argues that decisions about English pronunciation teaching should be based on what nonnative speakers need to be understood when they use English as a lingua franca with other nonnative speakers. The book has many strengths. First among them is its well-reasoned attempt to address the role of intelligibility from the view of the actual users. Second, and more important, is the fact that it uses cutting edge research to support its recommendations. Pronunciation teaching is notoriously short on research data and long on mythology, and Jenkins goes a long way toward changing this with data demonstrating the importance of pronunciation errors in miscommunication.

This is a book that may revolutionize English pronuncation teaching. Jenkins argues convincingly that in an age where English is THE global language it is no longer valid to teach students to conform to the British accent RP. Rather, the model for pronuncation training should be based on international intellibility. Analysing the conversations of non-native speakers Jenkins develops a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) that is, those phonological features which are necessary for international communication.

Jenkins starts out by explaining the concept EIL. After that she shortly sums up the arguments against RP. The middle part is a rather technical account of the various features of the LFC. At the end she outlines classroom activities and implications for teacher training courses.

This book can be strongly recommended to anyone involved in ELT.