Yeonkyoung No
Pronouns:
Research Mentor(s): Pamela Bogart
Research Mentor School/College/Department: English Language Institute /
Program: UROP
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Pamela S.H. Bogart, Yeonkyoung No
Abstract
Embracing diversity and acknowledging discrimination has long been advocated by language teachers, but actually engaging with diverse language use in published materials and classroom activities has been rare (Du, Lee, & Sok, 2020). This is especially true for English pronunciation or accent instruction. This project seeks to learn from work in a range of fields about how one dominant accent has been privileged in English language teaching and how pronunciation teaching could look different: more inclusive, more equitable, and more realistic about the many different accents with which speakers successfully communicate together (Galante & Piccardo, 2021). This presentation will feature four projects undertaken in an effort to share out this research with the larger English language teaching community: modeling a personal “accent awareness timeline” that can be used for teacher professional development, an extended annotated bibliography highlighting relevant research, photo documentation of participation in an English teaching professional conference, and a new YouTube video series that shares research on language diversity and pronunciation teaching. Each of these efforts seek to promote dramatic changes in how English pronunciation is taught.
