Workshop 'Accent Diversity and How to Deal with It'

No one will deny that the English language is widely used in the world. Its importance does not come from its 350 million native speakers. It is the ever expanding community of non-native speakers, who use English as the language of international communication or the lingua franca (ELF), which contributes to its importance. This way English is constantly evolving. By transferring features of their own mother tongue into English, non-native speakers eventually shape new varieties of English and add to its diversity palette. How to deal with those varieties and which variety to choose for communicating in ELF settings? We will answer these questions at the workshop.

The workshop will focus on the key units of the Russian - English pronunciation transfer (consonants and vowels) that may cause intelligibility problems in oral communication and quite often lead to underestimating Russian speakers’ public speaking performance and sociocultural image. The suggested approach may serve as an example for dealing with other transfer diversities which Russians are facing on a larger scale nowadays with the turn to the East.

Speaker: Tatiana Skopintseva, Ph.D. (Candidate of Sciences), Associate Professor, is currently Chair of the Humanities and Languages Department at New Economic School in Moscow. Before joining NES, she worked at the Department of English Phonetics at MSLU. Tatiana is an IREX scholar exchange program alumna, a frequent speaker at international conferences (IATEFL, ASIATEFL, HAAL) and an invited speaker and teacher-trainer for Russian Universities. Her areas of expertise include phonetics and phonology, EAP, ESP, ELF, EMI; English accent and pronunciation, diction, fluency, and public speaking.

Target audience: HSE teachers, researchers, and graduate students
Language: English
Date & Time: November 25, 17:30 - 19:30
Location: online