It is not true that a more native-speaker-like pronunciation can only be acquired in the language's country of origin. Knowledge about the workings of our speech apparatus as well as about the phonetic and phonotactic conventions of the foreign language can contribute immensely to one's sounding more like a native from England or America for that matter. In addition it may also prove worth while to contrast the phoneme inventory of the foreign tongue with that of one's mother tongue in order to be able to "hear with a foreign ear" and thus speak with a foreign tongue. The lecture will focus on the theoretical issues one needs to tackle in order to be able to transcribe British and American English phonologically and, to some extent, phonetically.
In addition to the lecture students will have to attend one of the tutorials where they will extensively practice to transcribe English texts. The registration for the tutorials will take place in the first session of the lecture. |
