Jennifer Book

2018 KOTESOL International Conference

Archive copy.

International Conference 2018
Featured Session

Pronunciation as a Lingua Franca: What Are Our Goals?

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Pronunciation is still a neglected area in the classroom – why is this? As the trend for English as a Lingua Franca increases globally, this talk will focus on Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. In it, I will discuss the pronunciation goals that we, as teachers, want our learners to aspire to, in terms of comprehensibility and intelligibility, and how our utopian ideals are changing as we realize the need to be more realistic in what we expect our students to be able to achieve.
In this session, I will be drawing on current literature (Derwing, Jenkins, Seidlhofer, etc.) and exploring personal classroom experiences. We’ll also spend some time looking at practical pronunciation activities that can be adapted and adopted for ELF contexts.

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Invited Second Session

Intercultural Competence and Critical Incidents in the Language Classroom

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Intercultural competence has become the buzzword of recent years in the fields of EFL, EIL, and ELF. In this talk, I will focus on what it means to be interculturally competent as a learner, given that English (and foreign language) courses are the ideal platform to prepare students for intercultural situations. Not only do they provide relevant practice opportunities, but they engage them at a personal level, too. Incorporating intercultural competence into students’ language learning activities will make the learning process more relevant and meaningful while preparing them for future communication strategies with other cultures.

We will look at some critical incident scenarios taken from literature and my own personal teaching experience and discuss them whilst reflecting on the possible applications of these critical incidents in different teaching contexts.
[ Session handouts available at bottom of this page.]

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Biographical Sketch

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Jennifer Book started her EFL career in Italy and London before settling down at the University of Sussex on the south coast of England. She has been a tutorial fellow there since 2004, where she convenes the ELT teacher-training elective pathway for undergraduates as well as teaching on a number of postgraduate-related courses. Jennifer is currently the IATEFL TTEd SIG newsletter editor, responsible for preparing and producing two newsletters a year, which are read globally by over 400 members. She has traveled the world extensively as a Trinity College London moderator (certificate course) and diploma examiner and marker. Jennifer has also appeared in various teacher training videos, having collaborated with Cambridge University Press, and with TeachTEFL, showcasing good practice in the classroom.

Jennifer currently resides in Brighton (well, Hove, actually) with her husband, daughter, and a menagerie of pets.

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