Hi everyone!
Welcome to those who have joined in the past few weeks and thanks for posting.
There's
clearly a lot of interesting stuff happening in the world of TESOL
pronunciation.

Yi Wang asked about research into English pronunciation for Chinese speakers.
Does
anyone have any good references? There's got to be something out there.
My related question is this: Given that pitch movement is distinctive at a
lexical level in
Chinese, is pitch also used to mark discourse as has been proposed for English?
If not,
how is discourse structured in Chinese speech?

Chris P. outlined his very effective looking teaching method of C=S+R. An
excellent way, I
think, of motivating students to examine their pronunciation and aim at
practical
improvements. One 'problem' may be that it's hard to define precisely what
'minus 1' or
'minus 2' is exactly, but students are less worried about phonetic precision
than pron
experts.
In his post, Chris said, "we can't really identify one native speaker variety
to base any clear
standard [of pronunciation] on and yet we go on trying" - I'd add to that, that
faced with
the concept of Lingua Franca English, our response has been to try to identify a
'Lingua
Franca variety' to classify as a standard. As we can't do that with 'native'
varieties,
shouldn't we be trying to think a little more laterally? Looking at variation in
varieties of
English, and the history of the language, suggests to me that the search for a
standard is
yet another chimera.

I think we're all quite excited by the idea of the Dynamic Speech Corpus that
Dermot wrote
about. So, Dermot, you said that you're limited by contracts etc. but what more
can you
tell us? Is it really possible to reduce the time needed for discourse analysis?
I analyzed a
25 minute radio show for my masters dissertation and reckon on 2 hours per
minute for
intonation analysis (probably more to be honest).
What do you mean by 'natural speech'? Data sources have, I believe, a massive
influence
on findings in the field of pronunciation.
Have you done any trials with students? Can you tell us anything about that?

Finally, there was a question about TESOL pronunciation norms in Poland. My
experience
matches Jonathan's response, that RP is the main model, related to politics I
suppose.
However, I wonder if that is changing now. At the last couple of IATEFL
conferences there
was a very strong feel that native speaker models are out. At the recent
Japanese
Association of Language Teacher (JALT) conference, there was little reference to
Lingua
Franca English in the pron talks. The older generation here in Japan tends to
favour British
English, while the younger generation go more for American. Discussion of ELF is
often
done on a broad global basis, but I think there are local issues that need to
taken into
account more explicitly.

Just one more question (yes, I would criticize my writing class students if they
put an extra
after saying 'finally'...) but I am interested in responses to the question of
the role of the
native speaker teacher in the world of international English. It's a tough
subject, but I
think it needs to be discussed.

So, here in Tokyo, the pavements are painted with the golden leaves of the Ginko
trees,
and Autumn Leave Viewing season is over. England, meanwhile, got a good covering
of
snow recently. I hope you're all enjoying nature's beauty wherever you are, and
I look
forward to discussing any of the ideas I've mentioned and of course any others.

All the best,

Alex.

Alex Selman
IATEFL PronSIG Discussion List Moderator.