Public plenary talk – Beatrice Szczepek Reed: Pronunciation and the accomplishment of social actions: Insights from Conversation Analysis

The aim of this talk is to go beyond the intelligibility debate and to suggest the need to consider the role of phonetics and prosody for natural interaction. Findings from empirical research show how vitally influential pronunciation is in terms of communicating, for example, turn taking, alignment with others, and sequential breaks or continuations. While it is not necessary for learners to use native-like pronunciation, learning to accomplish conversational actions is a crucial social skill and thus an important learning goal. The talk will show that learners who use non-standard pronunciation can be successful participants in talk-in-interaction. The presentation will discuss the complexities of pronunciation in interaction, as well as a way of incorporating some of them into a teaching approach.