Welcome to the course! Week 1
We are glad you are joining us for this learning journey!
In this course, we will help you improve your English pronunciation skills and you will learn about speaking English in today’s globalized world.
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- describe features of English pronunciation that are important for mutual understanding
- apply what you have learnt to your English pronunciation
- explain the differences between your own English pronunciation and that of other speakers, and reflect on the nature of different English accents.
In Week 1 you will learn about the concepts of understandability, credibility, and identity in English pronunciation in videos and exercises. You will share each other’s English pronunciations and learn about one of the major differences between English accents in the world. You will make a recording of your English pronunciation and peer-review a recording of one of your fellow learners. Finally, you will set pronunciation goals for the remainder of the course and you will have the opportunity to consult us about your goals.
We’ll guide you and your fellow learners through the course together so that you can support each other. We will be initiating discussions with you and your fellow learners and we hope that they will be productive. We won’t be able to answer every comment, but we’ll attempt to respond to common questions and thoughts. If you think you can help other learners by reading and responding to their questions or sharing your knowledge, we encourage you to reply in the comments area.
From October our team has been extended with two mentors from Vrije Universteit Amsterdam (VU): Amanda Whyte-Elsherif and Cecilia Montenegro-Pérez. We also say a special welcome to other mentors who will join us during the year, both from VU and external mentors. Their extra pair of hands and expertise of particular linguistic backrgounds will help us to provide you with more as well as more detailed feedback. We are very grateful for that! Look out for them replying to your comments; they will be signposted as ‘mentor’. Should you want to become a mentor in this course, please complete our mentor application form.
We would like to inform you that some of the exercises might not work on particular web browsers. While we did not experience this ourselves, we were told that this might happen with Internet Explorer/Edge. Should this be the case we would strongly advise you to switch to another browser, like Firefox or Chrome. We will assist you through this process.
We hope you will enjoy the course and look forward to reading your comments!
We welcome you to join our online community of English learners at our Instagram account and Facebook page. Here we share extra information and links along with friendly banter. We would also like to refer you to our YouTube channel.
We acknowledge VUvereninging for their support.
Good luck and best wishes,
Laura Rupp
Amanda Whyte-Elsherif
Cecilia Montenegro-Pérez
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Please follow us on FutureLearn! #FLengpron
