Donna Brinton: Dispelling Pronunciation Myths

• Saturday, December 7
• 4:30-6:00
• Room A108
• Kochi University of Technology (Eikokuji Campus)

Isn’t it impossible to impact students’ fossilized pronunciation? Wouldn’t students make more progress if they just practiced more? Don’t you need to be a native speaker to teach pronunciation? Isn’t the best way to teach pronunciation by having students listen and repeat? The field of pronunciation teaching abounds with myths that derive from lay beliefs about acquiring the sound system of a second language. Unfortunately, without adequate teacher preparation, teachers often buy into these myths and remain unprepared to teach pronunciation. In this talk, Donna Brinton presents an overview of recent research in practical phonetics that helps to dispel some of the above popularly-held misconceptions. She also summarizes best practice for pronunciation teachers.

We are proud to welcome Donna Brinton to Kochi to speak to our East Shikoku chapter members. Donna will be a plenary speaker at the JALT National Conference in Nagoya on Saturday, November 2. Her visit to Kochi is made possible through the support of the JALT Four Corners tour.

Donna M. Brinton currently works as an educational consultant. For over 30 years, she worked as a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-author/co-editor of numerous professional texts including Content-Based Second Language Instruction, The Content-Based Classroom, New Ways in Content-Based Instruction, New Ways in ESP, Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging, Teaching Pronunciation, The Linguistic Structure of Modern English, and the 4th edition of Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Her most recent publication (with Marguerite Ann Snow) is Content-Based Instruction: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know (University of Michigan Press, 2019).